Thursday Thoughts with Jason Beem for Dec. 18, 2025

A good Thursday morning to you all! This will be the last Thursday column for 2025 for me, so I wanted to do a bit of a look back on the year and some racing in general. We’ll do more of a longer-form year-in-review on my podcast the week after Christmas, but with Christmas and New Year's both falling on Thursdays, this is our last Thursday Thoughts for 2025. 

I wanted to start by looking back on my New Year's racing resolutions from January. The first one was to try to have at least one big-name racing executive on the show, which we really didn’t do. Our interview with Jim Goodman from Keeneland made some noise in regards to CAW for that meet, and we had some very well-known people like Steve Kornacki and Eddie Olcyzk on the show, but no real racing power brokers. Hopefully, we can snag a Dave O’Rourke or Bill Carstanjen in 2026! Overall, though, I did almost 200 podcasts with lots of cool people from around the sport, and we had hundreds of thousands of downloads, as we have for the last many years, and for that I’m very thankful!

New Year's Resolution number two was to visit Saratoga for Belmont (G1) weekend or get to Churchill Downs for a weekend. Zero for two on those two goals. I’ve been to both places, and both are amazing, but my schedule and other factors just didn’t allow me to make it to either spot this year. I did get to go to Mountaineer for West Virginia Derby Day, so that was good. As a whole, I didn’t visit as many tracks this year as I normally do. I’ve gotten back into baseball quite a bit over the last few years, so many of my off days during the summer were spent at minor and major league ballparks. The only “new” track I added to my tracks visited list was Aqueduct. I visited the Big A on a beautiful fall day, and it was everything I wanted it to be. 

So I wasn’t great at keeping my 2025 resolutions. Overall for me, I think it was a bit of a down year. Part of that is I think I’ve just been kind of “comfortable” in my various roles and life in general. From 2018 until 2023, I felt like I was constantly moving and chasing new opportunities, losing weight, working on my anxiety issues, etc. I think this year, I mostly just kind of ran in place in a lot of ways. It wasn’t a bad year, it just wasn’t a memorable one in any big ways. Which maybe isn’t such a bad thing. It’s funny because I think for so long I’ve chased comfort, but I think in some ways it actually works against a person. I want to try and find just a little more edge, a little more urgency, in my life and my work in horse racing. 

As far as “on the track memories," I think the race that sticks out to me the most was Journalism’s win in the Preakness (G1). While not the most impressive, just going from bad trip to near catastrophe to reeling in Gosger to win was such a huge gamut of emotions within a quarter-mile of Pimlico's racetrack. 

I hope 2025 was a great year for you, and I’d love to hear some of your racing or life highlights as we wind down the calendar year and head into 2026. I’ll have my New Year's racing resolutions in January and hope I stick to them!