Non-runner!

This busy week is wearing me out.  Three runners, all at evening meetings.  I'm already exhausted and we haven't had the worst yet.  Chelmsford Tuesday was easy enough: the last race (8.50) but it's local.  Sandown Wednesday was easy: 6.00 with the journey home not too bad, about two and a quarter hours.  Tomorrow will be the test of endurance: a 380-mile round trip to run in the 8.15 at Chepstow.  Let's hope that the trip is fruitful.  We'll get on the road early.  Jana and I will only ride one lot, and I hope that we'll be on the road at 9.30.

The traffic on a Friday will be atrocious so it's well to get on the road before it starts building up around lunchtime.  It's very hot this week (today's 38.1 in Cambridge was the highest July temperature ever recorded in Great Britain, and only just short of GB's all-time high of 38.5) and getting stuck in slow-moving traffic in high temperatures would hugely diminish Das Kapital's chances (seen on the Al Bahathri yesterday in the third photograph) as it would get hot back in the box and he would start to sweat profusely.  Much better to leave unrealistically early than hit traffic congestion.  And getting home?  Somewhere between 12.30 and 1.00, I would imagine, and maybe getting back in the house an hour or so after that.  Hopefully I'll be able to catnap for a few hours while I'm down there.  My life might depend on it, and I'm not joking.

Chelmsford was pleasing in the sense that it was good to see plenty of merit in Sacred Sprite's performance (seen pre-race in the first photograph) but frustrating in that she had nothing to show for it.  She kept finding trouble pretty much all the way round, so a strong-finishing sixth was no disgrace.  Hope Is High (seen pre-race in the second photograph) also ran well yesterday, fifth at Sandown on her first run since October.  One would say on that run that she should go close next time, although the one note of caution I would sound is that she was probably just a little bit flattered by her finishing position as she was so well ridden by Megan Nicholls.

In between we had a non-runner today.  I'm annoyed about that.  I don't like having non-runners.  I'd said in the previous chapter that I'd only entered Hidden Pearl (seen in the fourth photograph, eating her tea on Tuesday evening) at Yarmouth (today) in the hope that a maiden handicap there might produce a weak field, but that the entry was strong enough to convince me not to run.  However, come 9.00 on Tuesday (declaration time is 10.00) there were no horses declared.  Even by 9.45 there were still only two declared.  It made sense to declare.  So I declared and so did someone else - and then in the final two minutes three more horses were declared.

When I saw this, I would have immediately cancelled my declaration, as one always used to be allowed to do prior to declaration time, but one can't do that now.  That annoys me: circumstances change, and if declarations haven't closed, one should be able to cancel the declaration.  This is the second time that I have had an unnecessary non-runner this year because of not having been allowed to cancel a declaration prior to declaration time, and I hate having non-runners.  The target should be and, in my case anyway, is 0% non-runners.  Realistically that's unachievable as there's always going to be the odd horse who goes lame or falls ill in the final two days before the race; but adding in extra non-runners because of a bad rule pushes one's rate up even higher, and that grates.

Anyway, once we were declared I rationalized it that there would be no harm in running.  If I was right and the race was too competitive for her, all it would mean is that her rating would go down and hence she would have less weight when I did get her in the right race.  She only arrived here 13 days ago and I hadn't done much with her, but fitness wasn't an issue as she'd only run two days before that; but I thought that she clearly ought to have an easy gallop before she ran.  So she galloped second lot yesterday.  This was around 8.30 and the day was already warming up nicely, but it was only in the low 20s.

Anyway, she galloped very nicely, making me think that she might run OK today.  But she sweated a lot and, to my consternation, she was still blowing hard when she got back to the yard.  This was very disconcerting and, while I'm still learning about her as she is such a recent addition to the stable, it did make me worry that she possibly doesn't handle the heat very well.  One would have expected it to be around 10 degrees warmer at race-time this afternoon (on the day predicted possibly to be the hottest day ever recorded in south-east England) than it was when she galloped so my over-cautious and over-protective nature kicked in: I just thought that, if she doesn't handle heat well, it wouldn't be fair to run her on a freakishly hot day.

So she was a non-runner.  I didn't quite know which self-certificate option to tick as none of them fully described the scenario, but I took her out on the 'self-certificate - dehydrated' basis.  That probably comes closest if one has found on the day before the race that the horse is struggling in the heat, and one thus suspects that she is going to struggle in the heat even more on race-day.  In general I don't worry too much about running on a hot day (well, on the Flat anyway - I wouldn't run a jumper on a very hot day, although we found out today that others are happy to do so) but in this case the evidence of her exercise yesterday was that it probably would have been the wrong course of action with that filly today.  We'll wait until it's cooled down a bit and hopefully give her a run in a week or two.  In the meantime, I've got bigger fish to fry: I'm off to bed!