The devil is in the details.
1) I am not interested in defending or doing studies about patterns Friedman may or may not be pushing. I don't know what Hardoun(not Muldoon)said at Saratoga.
2) Alan does ROTW, not me. Alan also said we would do a run, and he misspoke. The reasons for not doing a run have nothing to do with open mindedness.
3) The matter is not one of opinion, it's one of experience.
4) As those who frequent this site know, I reject an awful lot of Ragozin dogma, and setting a fixed recovery time from a top would certainly be an example of something I would reject, if they said it.
5) I don't care what trainers and vets have to say about questions like this unless they have accurate data to work with, in which case they are not trainers and vets, they are customers.
6) Saying that 6 weeks is not enough time for a specific horse to recover has nothing to do with saying horses in general need 8 weeks. While I reject the strict rule, I certainly agree with the general concept. I take every horse as an individual, and try to figure out what the effort in question means to the horse in question, and sometimes factor in the trainer in question.
TGJB
