Quote:
Originally Posted by chadk66
So the other night I was looking through lifetime racing histories on some horses I trained over the years. The thing that really amazed me is how frequently horses were run back then. My horses generally ran every two weeks. Sometimes 10-12 days. Occasionally three weeks if races didn’t fill. And as a general rule I had sound horses all the time. I can’t honestly recall a vet scratch in all those years. We entered two days out for races then. It was pretty rare that I had to postpone an entry due to a physical ailment. I used no illegal meds ever. I never had a single bad test or so much as a bute overage. And I often hauled horses 500 miles to run and brought back. It just amazes me how much it’s changed. Granted the purses are far far higher now then they were then. But day rate is only 10-20% higher now at the tracks I ran at.
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My experience being a minor partner in some cheap claimers a decade ago is that most try to race every 10-14 days, mainly since that is the typical interval for the same race condition to come up. If you missed that race, you either had to move up in class, switch distance, or surface, or a combination of all three. Or wait until the next 10-14 cycle came up. If you couldn't keep up to that schedule it was usually due to injuries.
I was looking through some old DRFs from my misspent youth and was checking out the PPs of some of the hardknocking claimers that ran in NY. They races every 10 days to 2 weeks, and there were no form reversals. Horses would show gradual form curves, up and down, and most raced 20-25 times a year. I was a partner in only one horse that could have managed that, and she was bred by the trainer and had not been mucked with vet wise. She was dumb and slow, but sound until the day she retired. The others were so mucked up before we claimed them that the day rate ended up being overtaken by the vet work.