by Bob Carson

Editor’s Note: The USTA website is pleased to present freelance writer Bob Carson and his popular “Outside the Box” features. This monthly series is a menu of outlandish proposals presented with a wink — but the purpose behind them is serious. The views contained in this column are that of the author alone, and do not necessarily represent the opinions or views of the United States Trotting Association.

“Judge, I don’t need a mandatory workshop in anger management, you need a class in minding your own business and shutting up.”

“I learned a lot in my two weeks of Introduction to Intensive Rock Climbing, foremost was climbing is good, falling….not so much.”

Bob Carson

Most of us caught the harness racing bug early; we live with a virulent strain of racing fever in our bloodstreams. The remaining 99.6 percent of the population remains immune. Efforts to infect new patients have tried the patience of harness racing enthusiasts. Modern life has quarantined Americans from our little malady. Too bad, the sport would be healthier if more people would fall prey to the plague of pounding hoofs.

A scientific study that I just made up clearly proves that multiple exposures are needed before a new subject gets infected with the harness race bug. The intricacies of our sport require time and patience, ingredients that are in short supply in our modern world. The pace of life in the present times is at odds with the leisurely pace of horse racing.

The best hope of recruiting new harness race fans is forced incarceration at the racetrack for several weeks. The sentence should include both time in the grandstands and on the backstretch. With good behavior the incarcerated may take excursions to breeding farms and training centers.

The hope is that rehabilitation is possible for non-harness racing citizens. After a few weeks of mandatory rail birding and separation from work, cell phones, computers and television, a large percentage of the parolees would voluntarily return to the sport, our fan base will grow and happiness would reign throughout the land.

Autumn Ryan graphic

Without a doubt, many of you will believe forcing potential fans to sample harness racing may be a tad too extreme. Perhaps we should try something less extreme — voluntary workshops.

Enrolling in camps or workshops is becoming quite the rage. These camp-like activities go by various synonyms: workshops, conferences, symposiums, powwows, conventions, forums, jamborees, interventions, etc. I have attended three (one court ordered, two voluntary).

The new wave of activity-based camps work like this:

• First, you pick (or are assigned) an obscure topic like Feng Shui, songwriting, pottery, drug rehabilitation, fly fishing, wine tasting, curling, meditation, snorkeling, drama, rock climbing or geocaching.
• Second, you pay money.
• Third, you leave home and spend a week or two learning the new activity, usually under the tutelage of an expert (or parole officer).

People are strange. The more obscure and ridiculous the pastime, the more campers seem to enjoy the workshop or camp. And looking at many leisure activities from the outside they appear quite silly. As we do.

Imagine what harness racing looks like to graduate student from Joplin, Missouri. This first timer sees grown men with whips, perched on modified bicycles, attached to horses that are covered with straps and sticks, racing with odd gaits in circles. To us this is great. To a stranger, this activity does not scream “welcome stranger, we are an intriguing and worthwhile pastime.”

Still, it is hard to believe harness racing lags behind something like geocaching; a sport that is basically a treasure hunt for worthless treasure. Geocaching is an activity where apparently sane people use portable Global Positioning Satellite units (they look like cell phones) to track down objects such as small rubber toys that have been encased in plastic containers and then hidden in unusual locations (like tree trunks or old barns). Using longitude and latitude co-ordinates downloaded from the internet, the participants try to find the toy, open it up, sign their name and replace it for the next person. Then they gleefully seek out their next cache.

Lest you believe I am making up a preposterous pastime, digest these numbers: in a mere 12 years of activity there are more than 1.8 million active geocaches. More than five million people worldwide are geocachers and these folks spend mega-bucks on travel and equipment.

I digress. Let us return to the original promise. Harness racing would offer a wonderful adult camping opportunity. We fit all the criteria. We are exotic. We take money. We are fun. We offer a pleasant respite from the real world. We even have live animals.

The logistics also look good. Racetracks have plenty of empty space, plenty of railbirds, plenty of trainers who are sure they are experts, and very few children. All we need is to throw up a website, send out a few tweets, distribute a couple of brochures, book some nearby hotel rooms, heck, set up cots in tack rooms for the “true horseman’s experience.” It will take very little retrofitting and harness racing can transition into the adult camping business.

Like a fungus, harness racing grows on you. You can’t grow fungus in a day (except in my college fraternity house). A week-long camp would give new people a chance to learn how to read a program, delve into the complexities of stakes racing and condition races, decipher the mountains of racing equipment, understand pedigrees and wise financial management of wagering and horse ownership and discover all the work that goes into getting a horse behind the starting gate.

After we set up harness racing “camps” we could cross-market. One of our camp workshop activities could involve having harness campers hide a few of those plastic toys at the racetrack and then post the co-ordinates on the web. Then we could ask the geocachers to use their GPS units to find harness racing. The cachers might stick around and catch our horse racing virus.

You don’t think so? Hey, remember, these are people who find joy in spending money searching for hidden pieces of plastic. Compared to geocaching, horses racing would be modern camper nirvana.