This upcoming weekend, the North American racing calendar is bereft of Kentucky Derby Presented by Woodford Reserve preps – a brief break before activity picks back up on the last weekend or March and then continues steadily through mid-April.

The day before Thanksgiving my cell phone started blowing up with messages from my group chat. This wasn’t out of the ordinary because me and my three closest friends tend to text all day long. I was just sneaking off to the bathroom of my parents’ house in North Carolina to take a break from the high emotional climate caused by a recent car accident they had no business walking away from.