We address short-term, single-object tracking, a topic that is currently seeing fast progress for visual video, for the case of thermal infrared (TIR) imagery. Tracking methods designed for TIR are often subject to a number of constraints, e.g., warm objects, low spatial resolution, and static camera. As TIR cameras become less noisy and get higher resolution these constraints are less relevant, and for emerging civilian applications, e.g., surveillance and automotive safety, new tracking methods are needed. Due to the special characteristics of TIR imagery, we argue that template-based trackers based on distribution fields should have an advantage over trackers based on spatial structure features. In this paper, we propose a templatebased tracking method (ABCD) designed specifically for TIR and not being restricted by any of the constraints above. The proposed tracker is evaluated on the VOT-TIR2015 and VOT2015 datasets using the VOT evaluation toolkit and a comparison of relative ranking of all common participating trackers in the challenges is provided. Experimental results show that the ABCD tracker performs particularly well on thermal infrared sequences.