The Pinehurst Harness Track Is Back in Session. Most of Its Students Have Never Worn a Harness.

The Pinehurst Harness Track opened its winter training season on October 15, as it does every year, and the Village lists the season as running through May 1. The horses arriving now are mostly yearlings, and they spend the winter learning the basics of their sport. Everything about a morning at the track follows from that. Mornings are quiet, the work changes from month to month, and the season builds toward one crowded April afternoon. If you live in Pinehurst, you can watch the whole thing happen a few minutes from home.

A Winter Campus Since 1915

Here's the scale. The Village describes a 111-acre facility that has been a winter training center for Standardbred horses since 1915. Horses work on three tracks: a 1/2-mile sand and clay oval, a 5/8-mile sand jog track, and a 1-mile clay track. The grounds have 17 center-aisle barns with more than 280 stalls, plus grooms' quarters, RV hookups and paddocks. Those stalls are capacity, not a count of the horses on site in any given week.

Most of the horses in those barns are young. A feature in The Pilot found that while not every horse training in Pinehurst is a yearling, most are, and that the slower pace here lets them get used to tractors, onlookers and other young horses one at a time. A second trainer named Cole put the starting point plainly in the same story: "When the horses first get here, most of them, they've never had a harness on. They've never had a bridle on."

Last season gives a sense of how stables arrive. The Sandhills Sentinel reported that Pinehurst Racing Partners, the local syndicate founded by harness-racing advocate Marty McKenzie, shipped in five young horses from Ohio in October 2025, three fillies and two colts. Its four older horses followed in early December, and Scottie Freeman and his staff did the training. Other stables come down from northern tracks on their own schedules. That's why the barns tend to fill gradually through the fall rather than all at once in mid-October.

October and March Look Like Different Sports

The training follows a sequence, so the month you visit decides what you'll see. Going by the progression trainers described to The Pilot, the season runs roughly like this:

1. Getting acquainted. New arrivals get brushed and handled before any equipment goes on.
2. Gear and jogging. Trainers slowly introduce the harness, the bridle, the leg loops called hopples that help a horse keep its gait, and the jog cart. Then each horse is driven around the track every day. One barn in the story worked 13 horses a morning at 3 to 3 1/2 miles each.
3. Manners before speed. "You got to teach them to go straight before you can teach them to go fast," trainer Mallar told The Pilot.
4. Short bursts and passing. After a base of roughly 100 to 250 jog miles, trainers start short pushes of about an eighth of a mile and have horses pass each other so they get used to traffic.
5. The stopwatch. Mallar said he doesn't really time a horse until it's running miles between 2:40 and 2:45. After that he starts bringing the times down.

So an October visit is the season for spooked horses and patient handlers. The Pilot described a young horse bolting when it met a tractor grading the 1/2-mile clay track. Its driver steered it onto the infield grass, turned it around to face the tractor, and on the next lap it went past cleanly. By late winter the same horses are passing each other at speed with trainers timing them. If you go once now and again in March, you'll see the change for yourself.

You'll also be watching two different gaits. Trotters move their opposite front and hind legs together. Pacers move both legs on the same side together, a gait that only a handful of animals, giraffes and camels among them, use naturally.

Built Around a Dawn-to-Noon Day

The track runs on the horses' clock. Trainers usually work from dawn until about noon. A long-running listing in The Pines Times invites the public to watch training, usually Monday through Saturday from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., October through April. That listing has been up for several seasons, so check before planning a morning around it. Barns are working spaces, and the track is for horses, so plan to watch from the edges.

The Track Restaurant keeps nearly the same hours. The Sway reported in May 2025 that Casey Parrish and Harry Arsi, who also run the Pita Perfect food truck, took over the restaurant on April 1 that year. At the time it had been a breakfast spot for 29 years, best known for its blueberry pancakes. The new owners planned to keep the menu, add specials, and keep it cash only. "If it's not broke, why fix it?" Parrish told The Sway. The building is historic and owned by the Village, which is why the changes were limited to curtains and decor.

As of spring 2025, the restaurant was open 6:30 a.m. to noon Tuesday through Sunday, with plans to stay open until 2 p.m. starting May 20. Two practical points follow if those hours still hold. A Monday at the track means watching without breakfast, and a 7 a.m. arrival lets you watch the first sets go out and still get a table. Hours can change, so confirm them, and bring cash.

A few doors down, the Country Saddler lists its shop at 200 Beulah Hill Road S., #3B. It's open Thursday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and by appointment on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. That means a Thursday-through-Saturday visit can run from the first jog sets through breakfast to the shop's late-morning opening.

After Noon, the Fair Barn Takes Over

When training wraps up for the day, the historic Fair Barn takes over in the evenings. Late fall is busy with community fundraisers, and the winter calendar already has a dance on it:

Details for the four fall events are on The Pines Times pages for Cocktails & Costumes, the Carolina Philharmonic gala, Flavors of Scotland and Purse Bingo. The site notes that events can change without notice, so check with the organizer before you go.

The same grounds host more than harness horses. The Village lists polocrosse, dressage and hunter-jumper competitions on the track infields, along with a permanent outdoor show arena inside the 1/2-mile track.

The Village Owns the Ground

Pinehurst can host a winter school for racehorses because the Village owns the property. It bought the track in 1992, and the same year the Harness Track was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, on November 22, 1992. According to U.S. Trotting News, the site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1996, but that protection covers the training facility and the half-mile and five-eighths-mile tracks, not the mile track. In a June 2025 feature, McKenzie argued that the mile track is what matters most to the trainers:

"The mile track is the real reason these horsemen keep coming back every winter, and, oddly enough, it's the one thing that's not protected, so we have to change that."

The Village is putting money into the site now. On September 8, 2026, the Village Council approved Ordinance 26-20, which moves $35,065 in Parks and Recreation project savings to the Harness Track paving project. The low bid came in at $210,065, above the original $175,000 budget. The Village says the work will improve the main roadway and parking area that serve the track and its businesses and will lower ongoing maintenance costs. The council highlights say only that the project will proceed and give no construction dates. Watch for notices if you drive in for breakfast this winter.

April Is the Payoff

The season peaks with the Spring Matinee, a few weeks before the May 1 close. The Pilot describes it as the track's annual exhibition races, held after about half a year of training. The horses, now 2-year-olds, race in front of a crowd before shipping north to tracks like the Poconos, Yonkers and the Meadowlands in New Jersey. The matinee draws crowds of up to 5,000 people, according to U.S. Trotting News. The 77th annual matinee ran April 11, 2026. The 2027 date hasn't been announced, so keep an eye on the Village calendar this spring.

If you've watched a few October mornings, some of the April racers will be the same horses you saw learning to wear a harness.

The Harness Track is one of the places that make Pinehurst feel like home outside of golf season. If you'd like to talk about the track, the Fair Barn, or how the village's seasons shape everyday life here, Ross Laton is always glad to compare notes. Let's Connect.