I have just come off 2 great weekends of doing intervals in 2 completely different locations, on 2 completely different set ups. I was at the BRN4D Finals in Oregon City, OR on an outdoor standard pattern, and the UBRA World Finals in Verndale, MN on an indoor small pattern.
From doing intervals over the years I have learned so many valuable lessons. Although we are trying to clock the fastest, how fast your horse is, is not what you should be worried about.
The distance we are asking the horses to travel vs the length of their stride and general speed is a small offering of what they are capable of. This computes to the fact that most horses ARE fast enough to clock.
Here are the stats from both events. The only times that have been removed are runs over 20 seconds. The BRN4D finals we are missing some runs as we had a bit of interference with the eyes the first day.
The names, riders and run times from 3rd barrel to the timer line on both different courses are at the bottom of this article. The bottom line is, the odds of your horse not being fast enough to clock in the 1D is about 6.7% on a small pattern, and 16.3% on a full size, outdoor standard pattern.
This smattering of data doesn’t even take into account who DIDN’T TRY TO RUN HOME.
Why aren’t horse clocking then?
If we know that horses are generally fast enough to keep up with the horses winning the race, the path WHERE we ask them to travel and HOW we ask them to travel has more to do with their success at being a 1D horse than anything else.
Samantha Winslow
Intervaltiming.com Owner & Founder of Take Time off the Clock Workshop
Click here to see the full data offering for the stats
(Names, Horses, 3rd to Line stats & Final Running Time)
There is a tab at the bottom that you can click through the 2 different events.
The splits are sorted fastest to slowest.