He talked quickly, like a man in a hurry. Gary Johnson obviously doesn't like to waste time, a precious commodity when you have stables at two tracks, 150 horses to look after, owners to call, entries to make, a handful of cards to handicap and an intense will to succeed not just in one profession, but two.

"The only thing that I am scared about is failure," he said. "I've got to go for whatever I can get."

Lately, failure hasn't been much of a problem.

Johnson, 44, is in the midst of a remarkable year. Not only did he win the recently concluded Randall meet at Thistledown, where he is the perennial leader in the standings, but he took the training title at Mountaineer Park's summer meet, becoming the first trainer not named Dale Baird to win a meet title at the West Virginia track since 1981. The hard work and long hours that it takes to operate at two tracks hasn't stopped him from focusing on his first love, handicapping. Johnson is regarded as one of the best handicappers in the Midwest and he has a long list of success stories to prove it.

The beginnings of Johnson's racetrack career start off in familiar fashion. At age 16 the Cleveland native decided the racetrack was for him and he began on the bottom, as a hotwalker for Thistledown trainer W.J. Miller. Two years later, he went out on his own.

"When I was 18 I got my trainer's license in Cleveland and I did okay, but never had much opportunity," he said. "Most owners want to switch to the leading trainer and if you're tenth in the standings, you're not going to get much action."

Frustrated, Johnson quit as a trainer and became a professional handicapper. Along the way, he had handicapping jobs at the now-defunct Birmingham Turf Club and at Fort Erie. But his reputation as a handicapper was made with the 1991 Breeders' Cup and the first-ever Breeders' Cup Pick Seven. Johnson advised a syndicate of Cleveland gamblers and turned in a heroic handicapping feat. Nobody in the nation picked all seven winners, but Johnson's group had six of seven on nine of its tickets. With only 29 of the tickets sold in the country having six winners, the Cleveland syndicate collected about $2 million. The only horse he missed was Miss Alleged, who was 42-1 as part of the mutuel field. He singled Classic winner Black Tie Affair.

On another occasion, Johnson advised a group that hit a Pick Eight at Tampa Bay Downs for $186,000.

One of the people who had benefitted from Johnson's handicapping expertise was owner Mark Yagour. He respected Johnson's opinions and found that his gambling buddy often knew more about his horses than his trainers did. In 1996, he decided to give Johnson a chance and sent him to Delaware Park with a barn of his horses. Johnson won 35 races that year and hit the winner's circle at a 30 percent clip. Yagour was sold.

"Gary is a guy who knows how to read the condition book, knows his horses and knows which way to go with a horse after we claim him," Yagour said.

With a barn full of Yagour's horses, Johnson returned to Thistledown late in 1996 and has been the track's dominant trainer ever since. There's never been anyone like him, a trainer who doubles as a professional handicapper. It gives him an edge in both aspects of the business.

"Unlike most of the other people who come to the grandstand to gamble, I've been able to learn about horses and have an edge over them," he said. "I've been around the track since I was 16 and I learned what it takes to win a race not only as a gambler, but as a trainer.

One of Johnson's favorite tricks is to enter more than one horse in most of the races in which he takes part. After the Form comes out, he'll handicap the race and figure out which one of his horses is the best fit, considering the competition and the likely pace scenarios. The other will be scratched.

His Thistledown duties alone were taxing enough, but he decided to nearly double his workload when he set up shop at Mountaineer Park after that track's purses rose dramatically due to the legalization of slot machines at West Virginia tracks. The easy thing to do would have been to leave an assistant in charge of the day-to-day responsibilities and do the rest of the work by phone. That, however, is not his style.

"Every day after the races in Cleveland, I drive to Mountaineer," he said. "It's a two-hour trip. I have a great assistant in Cleveland, but at the other track I don't feel I have the type of help that would be capable of taking over. That's the type of place where everybody knows everybody else and I like to be very private in the way I run my business and the type of horses I claim."

The reward was the Mountaineer victory over Baird. The cost was exhaustion. Johnson admits he has not held up that well to the intense grind.

"It's tough," he said. "Back in June, I was in the hospital for the first time in my life. I was treated for dehydration. I felt I was getting too weak and so they put me on fluids. It gets to be pretty crazy when you run 10, 12 a day."

Still, he hasn't stopped. He's busy picking horses and gambling every day and hosts handicapping seminars at Thistledown. Thistledown closes for the season Dec. 31 but that won't slow down Johnson, who will start racing at Charles Town. But even a workaholic who says he fears failure above all else knows he can't keep it up forever.

He wants to find the right people so that he will be comfortable letting someone else take over a large share of the training duties. That would allow him to re-focus his energies on handicapping and do what he he really wants to do, develop a professional tipping service. In the meantime, he'll keep going the way he's been going, talking fast, racing between tracks and winning a lot of races.