To celebrate the first anniversary of a heart attack that could have been a whole lot worse, Jimmy Jerkens took his repaired ticker out for a thriller of a test drive last Saturday at Belmont Park while watching Preservationist win the historic Suburban by more than four lengths. Jerkens had to tap the brakes in early July 2018, when chest pains sent him to a cardiologist who immediately went to work inserting stints in a pair of blocked arteries. After a slow, steady recovery, Jerkens has been back to such admirable health and hard work that time seemed to slip away. “It was a year ago,” he said Monday morning from Belmont. “I forgot about that.” Working with a horse like Preservationist certainly can distract from what otherwise ails a trainer. Every Thoroughbred athlete deserves a little time off now and then, but this guy seemed to abuse the privilege. In the Suburban, the 6-year-old son of Arch was making the eighth start and stakes debut of what had been loosely called a career for the Centennial Farms partnership. To this point, it had been more of a hobby. Jerkens waited until June 2016 to unwrap Preservationist in a maiden event for 3-year-olds. He finished second, but the experience was so traumatic that he did not run again until December 2017. Two races and two wins later Preservationist was gone again, absent from February 2018 until January 2019. By this time his lip tattoo was wearing thin, and the finest members of his generation – Gun Runner, Arrogate, Nyquist, and Exaggerator – were filling nurseries with a bounty of their foals. “It’s been frustrating as hell,” Jerkens said. “It’s been so long ago that I don’t even remember why he didn’t run until well into his 3-year-old year. He’s a big horse, and he’s got nice looking limbs. But his feet are a little contracted and small, and he’s had a little ankle trouble. But it was the feet that always got him.” Long layoffs between races for good horses usually trace to either foot trouble or soft-tissue damage. A trainer will take foot trouble every time. “He’s been patched a hundred times,” Jerkens said. “It’s like that old saying, ‘He needs a race with conditions of nonwinners since Pearl Harbor.’ ” Preservationist’s long 2018 pause was due to an ankle that eventually responded to rest rather than surgery. Jerkens got him back, then had to stop again. “After he won in the winter, he got a couple of quarter cracks,” Jerkens said. “After we opened them up and let the infection run out, then let the foot grow down a little, he responded to the patch. He hasn’t looked back since. “I was praised the other day for my patience with him,” Jerkens added. “But I had no choice. It was either retire him or wait it out.” Patience, a term that implies the resistance of temptation, is often confused with the straightforward management of a Thoroughbred’s health and physical condition. John Gosden was likewise praised for his “patience” in waiting to unveil the 5-year-old version of Enable last Saturday in her triumphant Coral Eclipse Stakes at Sandown. Enable, who has now lost only once in 12 starts, had not run since her electrifying win in the Breeders’ Cup Turf last Nov. 3 at Churchill Downs, making it 244 days between races. Her goal was always a shot at an unprecedented third straight victory in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in Paris this fall, and now she is positioned to have that chance. Both Jerkens and Gosden are sons of trainers known for listening more to the voices in their heads than the clamor around them. John “Towser” Gosden was known for his work with high-class handicappers and the occasional Group 1 performer. He died in 1967, while his teenage son was still in school. Jimmy Jerkens was all of 3 years old when his father, Allen Jerkens, won the 1962 Suburban Handicap with Beau Purple for the Hobeau Farm of Jack Dreyfus. Beau Purple took advantage of a 17-pound pull in the weights to beat two-time Horse of the Year Kelso by 2 1/2 lengths in track-record time for the 1 1/4 miles. Over the subsequent decades, the elder Jerkens continued to win major East Coast races with an almost mystical consistency in a mixture of surprising upsets and dead-lock favorites. Allen Jerkens died in 2015 after spending 40 of his nearly 86 years in the Hall of Fame. Preservationist gave the Jerkens boys their seventh Suburban victory over the 57-year span since Beau Purple, with Allen adding two from Devil His Due and another from Political Force to Jimmy’s consecutive scores with Effinex, and now Preservationist. “He’s had some big races when he wasn’t 100 percent fit,” Jerkens said. “He finally got the chance to put back-to-back races together and train the way you should for a big race, I thought the other day that we’d see what he was he was really all about. He had trained superbly and looked good doing it. “Winning was really special,” he added. “He’s almost like an old-style horse, with the long works. He just loved it, he became a better horse, and he looked like he had a lot left.”