Aberdeenshire based trainer Jackie Stephen saved herself a huge 11 hour round trip after preparing wisely ahead of travelling to Catterick Racecourse after their scheduled meeting was abandoned due to frost.
The trainer was set to travel around a 630 mile trip just to race one horse at Catterick across the seven race card but due to the adverse weather conditions it was not to be.
The story behind this though is the female trainer luckily did not set off with suspicion that the meeting was going to be abandoned saving her yard a fortune in expenses and an overall waste of a day.
Jackie Stephe said: "We intended so set off the day before but with the dodgy forecast we waited until 6 o’clock this morning.
"The journey would have been six hours but we phoned Catterick on Tuesday and arranged an early phone conversation just before 6 o’clock, due to a temperature of -6 degrees over night and the course was very doubtful of racing being on."
We spoke to the Scottish based trainer about how tough it must be being based in the North of the UK, with less opportunities around her to get horses racing in decent contests with respectable prize money.
She added: "The biggest struggle of training in Aberdeenshire is the distance to all race courses"
However, for the consequences this holds there are plenty of things that do give the edge to training in Aberdeen and she wouldn't change it for the world and believed today her horse had a great chance on landing the race.
"We have a large farm on which to vary the training," she added.
"As there were 4 horses in the race and ours is feeling good yes I was hopeful of some prize money."
In cases like this which must happen a lot for the trainer there can be compensation given to the yard by the racecourse with it being out of the trainers hands that the meeting was called off.
However, Jackie Stephen explained it was not the case today as she had made the cautious decision to wait it out until further instruction due to the length of travel.
The trainer said: "No compensation needed really as all ok for another day."