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. "; 1 1 -v. How to Train Horses By JULIUS BAUER. - - 4 ARTICLE VII. It will take two months of "hardening up" before you begin breezing horses after having taken them up from their winter quarters. This applies to every member of the stable from juveniles to older horses. I It means steady work, day in and day out. Every horse gets a jog of one mile, followed by a slow gallop over another mile. This is monotonous work on paper, but you will be a mighty lucky trainer if every member of j your string goes through the preparatory work without illness, injury or some slight indisposition. Assuming that you have been fortunate and your charges have come along handily in their preparatory work, you can begin breezing them the first time over three-eighths of a mile, well within themselves. That "well within themselves" was explained in a previous article. The youngsters just turned two are given a breeze of a quarter of a mile. If you breeze the horses on Monday, you must allow them two days interval before breezing them again. That N would mean their next fast bit of work would come on Thursday. Two days in between breezes is the schedule I follow and is followed by the majority of trainers. Some horses are exceptions to the rule. Some cannot stand the schedule, having a nervous disposition or some other quirk in their nature that "fines" them down too soon. In that event, you will have to experiment perforce until you find out just what the nervous individual requires in the way of work. On the days between breezes, the horses are given a jog of three-quarters, with a gallop of one mile and a quarter a slow gallop of course. That is my -schedule for every horse in the stable, including juveniles. TWO BREEZES EACH. Assuming that our stable is well balanced, including sprinters and horses that like a distance, I would repeat the three-eighths breeze for all of them Thursday, the youngsters, of course, repeating over tne quarter-mile. That would mean every horse in the string had two good breezes. Then the I schedule would be changed slightly. Supposing that we had a sprinter we fig-lured fitted a race in the books two weeks away. He, or they, would get their next breeze over five-eighths, while the stayers j would be stepped up to three-quarters, j I would prefer to give any horse I am training about six good breezes before starting him. The schedule we are following here calls for only five works for speed, which means that the sprinters fourth breeze would fall on the Sunday in the week previous to his race. This would be over three-quarters of a mile, the next one, on Wednesday, calling for seven-eighths, letting j him run on his own courage if he is a free-j runner, but if the sluggish type I would instruct the boy to "cluck" to him to send him along and make him pay attention to business. If his race was to fall on Tuesday, I would "blow him out" on Monday. That means letting him breeze three-eighths or a quarter I under a hand ride. Naturally, you must use the stop watch on all his moves, timing him I to ascertain his condition and to see if he , is responding to your conditioning methods. He should show increased speed as you bring him up to a race. DAY OF THE RACE. Tuesday, the day of his race, he gets- his morning rations as usual, but with a half portion of hay andis jogged three-quarters and galloped a mile and a quarter as usual. His midday meal is cut in half. If he is in an early race he would get the mid-day meal at eleven oclock instead of at noontime. If the horse is a heavy eater he will have to be muzzled after each meal. A light eater can be muzzled after he has had his morning gal-jlop and again after he has eaten his noon i. meal. A heavy eater, with his rations cut down, may eat the straw from his bedding, and you must guard against this. t Every time you work your horse for speed I you must time him, but there is no definite program that can be laid out for this phase of training. The time he makes in his workouts will vary with the class of the horse. Dont be fooled, however, by horses that are sluggish in the morning, or others that "burn up" the track when the sun is high. A "morning glory" is a horse that shows brilliant speed iri the morning but lacks every vestige of class or speed in a race. Arsenal, which I owned and trained and which won the Metropolitan Handicap for me, was a horse which as a youngster could hardly raise a respectable gallop as a two-year-old. I liked his conformation and breeding, however, and was in no hurry to get rid of him. The best work I could ever get out of him in the early stages of his two-year-old year was five-eighths in 1:04. That was in June. I entered him in a purse at Sheepshead Bay and was not disappointed when he was beaten. ARSENAL WINS. Two weeks later the Maiden Stakes, for non-winners, which had closed in the spring, was coming up and I sent Arsenal right back into it. He was eligible and I considered it worthwhile to pay the starting fee. Much to my surprise the competition in the race seemed to bring him to life and he won, and from that time on Arsenal seemed to have discovered himself, but he was never a good work horse. After he had won the Maiden Stakes it would have taken considerable money to pry the colt loose from my string. His lack of speed in workouts, however, never fooled me again. I could tell by his appearance and actions when he was right. Our sprinter having started and lost, I knew that he was "short," just another way of saying that he had not had enough training work. He stayed right up with the pacemakers in his race, but after a half-mile was willing to call it quits. Earlier in this training schedule the reader will note that the sprinters last long breeze before his three-quarter mile race was over seven-eighths of a mile. Theres a reason for that. I always like to breeze my charges over a distance longer than that over which they are to race. STARTS TEN DAYS LATER. I sent the sprinter back into a race ten days later. In the meantime he was given his usual three-quarter job and mile and a quarter gallops on the days he was not breezed. When he was given "sharpening up" works two in all he was breezed half a mile first, then another breeze two days later over seven-eighths. He was raced on a Tuesday; the next day he was walked, not galloped or breezed. On the next two days, he was given the usual exercise work, then his half-mile breeze, two more jogs and gallops on the following two days and then his seven-eighths breeze. He was "blown-out" or "opened up" again on the day before his race. On the day he races, a horse in my stable gets half a bucket of water with his feed. He is watered-off as usual during the cooling-out process following his morning work. The last water given to them before they race is with the mid-day meal. Much depends upon the individual, but my contention is that a race once a week is enough for any horse. Once every ten days is still better. If you dont care much for horses, and there are many trainers who do not, considering them merely a means to an end; they "sweat them for the brass;" just another way of describing running a horse to death to win money. To be continued.
