Can a good race be too good? That may be answered in the weeks ahead with Read the Footnotes, who ran so fast and so hard in the Fountain of Youth at Gulfstream Park there's no telling what the race may have done to him. He's far from done, but is he in trouble?

"In a way I didn't want that," trainer Rick Violette Jr. said minutes after Read the Footnotes outgamed Second of June through a long and tenacious battle that began about three furlongs from the wire.

No smart trainer would. The idea, with more than 10 weeks to go before the ultimate goal of the Kentucky Derby, is to get a horse to progress through a series of races so that they reach their peak on the first Saturday in May. Read the Footnotes didn't have any allowance conditions left, which gave Violette little choice but to start him off in a tough spot like the Grade II Fountain of Youth. Worse yet, he ran into a monster in Second of June, who would force Read the Footnotes into giving everything he had while running an exceptionally fast race.

The final time of 1:42.71 for the mile and a sixteenth produced a Beyer figure of 113. That's good enough to have won seven of the last 10 Kentucky Derbies. That's the good news. The bad news is that it can't possibly leave much room for improvement.

The worst case scenario would be for Read the Footnotes to take a huge step backward off the Fountain of Youth, bounce in the Florida Derby and then find it impossible to regroup before the Kentucky Derby. The race was so tough on Second of June that it knocked him off the Derby trail with a fractured cannon bone. The initial signs from Read the Footnotes have been encouraging enough that Violette is cautiously optimistic that won't happen.

"I really like the early signs," he said Tuesday morning. "He's eaten the last couple of nights and is at the front of his stall eating his hay with his ears pricked. We've had a couple of nice, cool days and that hasn't hurt. It's not one of the cases where he's in the back of the stall, a half shrunken, exhausted horse. He came back better than I expected. If he had lied down for three days after the race I wouldn't have been surprised."

Knowing that the Fountain of Youth could turn out to be a tough test, Violette said he made sure that Read the Footnotes was fit and ready going in. Looking back, he knows it was the right thing to do.

"I was concerned enough that I knew I couldn't lead him over there too short," he said. "Horses that run on or near the pace usually run until they are tired and run past the point of exhaustion if they are good horses. Because of that, you can't lead them over there too short. It's nice to think about the future and what's down the road and not over training them, but the penalty could be more severe if you under train them. With a race like that, if he wasn't fit enough, the race could have torn his guts out."

An acceptable scenario would be for the Fountain of Youth to cause Read the Footnotes to bounce some in the Florida Derby, but recover in plenty of time to right himself well before the Kentucky Derby. With more than 10 weeks to go until the Kentucky Derby and more than three before the Florida Derby, he has plenty of time to recover from whatever the race may have done to him.

Wisely, Violette is not about to take it easy on his horse at this point. He's seen too many horses that came into the Kentucky Derby under prepared fall apart. "It's a bit of a paradox," he said. "We have four weeks between races and maybe we'd like to have another two or three more, but it seems that the horses who are babied going into the Triple Crown races crash and burn. If he is training well and eating well, we will run in the Florida Derby, even with the understanding that he may bounce some or take a couple of steps back. That may still be good enough to win."

The best case scenario is that Read the Footnotes ran hard and fast simply because he is a good horse and that he didn't necessarily overextend himself, but ran to his level. If that turns out to be the case, Violette believes the race will do him a world of good in the long run.

"Looking at this through rose-colored glasses, races like that make good horses," he said. "It moves them forward. Look at Easy Goer's Preakness. He came out of that unbeatable. With good horses, you need to challenge them and see them rally to the challenge. They will come out of it better."

Whatever happens, Violette's training abilities are about to be tested. Though he's never had a Kentucky Derby starter, he's proven over the years that he is a capable and professional horseman. Much like Barclay Tagg with Funny Cide, the only thing that had been holding him back was that he had never been given a chance with a top class horse. He's got one now in Read the Footnotes, who proved Saturday that he is a very good horse. Now Violette just has to keep him that way, as tricky as that may be.