Millie Ball: John, Honor A.P. worked on Sunday what is he showing you from that breeze moving forward to the Santa Anita Derby April 4th?
John Shirreffs: I thought he had a really good work. Sunday’s work was about matching strides. He worked with a big horse that’s almost 17 hands, he’s a router and has a big stride so we were going to go five eights and I wanted Honor A.P. to have to match strides, let’s say your dancing with somebody and you want to be in sync, I think it’s really important for a horse just to get really comfortable running alongside another horse and being able to match strides with that horse and be comfortable, not have to hurry or work at it. That was the goal for him, I wanted him to able to match strides with his company.
Obviously he did it very well, he’s got a huge stride himself so that wasn’t of any issue but then we wanted to see him be able to just pick it up a little at the end which he did. Sunday’s work was really good, it was sort, of let’s get back to work now! He had his little half mile breeze nine days after his race which was like…..alright let’s make sure everything is ok and now we have to work.
That was basically it and he went really well. Also I might add Millie, with your experience with horses, is about repeating performances and the same thing with the morning you want the horse to be able to go out and do his work and get a good blow from it but at the same time not to overdo it and become stressed by it. And how quickly they cool out and how much water they drink are all little factors that go into the amount of effort it took the horse to perform the work.
The work wasn’t a big effort for him (Honor A.P). Those are the kind of things you look for when you’re training because you want your horse to be at the level where he’s handling his training well enough to get to the next level.
Link to see work:
