Decisions, decisions - and rain, rain ...

And then there was one.  We'd hoped to run Kryptos on Saturday (two days ago), Hope Is High on Monday (today), Sussex Girl on Tuesday (tomorrow) and Roy on Wednesday (the day after tomorrow).  I decided that Kryptos wasn't quite ready to resume.  And then I decided not to declare Hope Is High because of the heavy ground. That left us with two likely runners.  Now that's down to one.  Fingers crossed Parek (Sussex Girl) will run at Brighton tomorrow, but I haven't declared Roy for the same course on Wednesday.

It will be worryingly (from our point of view) soft at Brighton tomorrow after a grim night and then day today, but on Wednesday the ground should be even softer as there is a further band of rain forecast to come in Tuesday night into Wednesday.  I'm slightly uneasy about Parek as I fear that she might struggle on heavy. But she has won (over course and distance) on soft so she should be OK to run.  But nearly all of Roy's best form is on fast ground, and it should be properly soft there by Wednesday, so not declaring but waiting another six days to go there (hopefully on better ground and in better weather) the following Tuesday seemed the best thing to do.

That, of course, makes it all seem very straightforward - which, of course, it certainly isn't.  I actually find this thing of trying to work out whether we should or shouldn't be running quite stressful; the trying to work out how the weather will work out and how the horse might or might not cope with the different conditions, and so forth.  I suppose one can be more blase about it if one has more runners, but - even though I've been training a long time so ought to be innured to it all - we're still at the stage of having maybe fifty or sixty runners a year, so that means that every runner has to count.  I don't like feeling that I've run a horse who ought not to have run, or to have not run a horse who ought to have run.

Anyway, for better or worse that is what we are doing.  We've then got to make more decisions later in the week: Hope Is High is entered at Chepstow on Friday (at a meeting at which the ground may well be softer than I want - but even then one is still only guessing how the horse might or might not handle the ground as it might or might not be) and at Goodwood on Saturday (in a race which is very likely to be too strong for her) and Kryptos is entered at Doncaster on Saturday.  Let's hope that the horses which I decide not to run are right not running; and the ones I decide to run were right to be running.  We'll see.