Today I want to relay a story that I hinted at briefly during Jersey but that now deserves a full explanation. To protect the identity of the story’s subject, we will call him Boyd Martin. I can’t relay the story with the same hilarity of Boyd telling it, but it is amazing nonetheless. I found Boyd with a cast on his left wrist Thursday at Jersey, and I asked him what happened.
In mid-March, Boyd took a hard tumble from Last Monarch at Southern Pines. At the time, the doctors were so concerned with the possibility of a head and neck injury that they focused on those areas and put Boyd through a CT scan at the hospital. When the scan came back showing that all was well with Boyd’s head and Boyd could once again tell them that President Obama was the leader of the free world, they sent him on his way. Boyd show jumped the next day.
Boyd took a weekend off from competing and then subsequently competed for the next 5 weekends, including 4 horses at The Fork, 7 at Plantation Field, 7 at Fair Hill, and then a light weekend with only one horse competing…at Rolex, followed by 8 horses at MCTA the next weekend. As Boyd told me at Jersey, his wrist had been bothering him during all of this time and he would feel shooting pain through his arm when the would bend the wrist. But, being a crazy eventer who loves riding, Boyd just persevered and rode on.
A few days after MCTA, Boyd was at the farm with his veterinarian, Kevin Keane. Boyd told Kevin that his wrist was still hurting so Kevin shot an x-ray with his mobile machine. If you don’t know, eventers are usually much more likely to get x-rayed by a vet in their barn than a technician at a hospital. As the story goes, Kevin took one look at the x-ray and sent Boyd to see a doctor. Boyd went straight to the famous Dr. Chris Lyons, an orthopedist who treats many riders and jockeys. Boyd had a bone chip and hairline fracture in his left wrist that, thanks to weeks of riding all day long, looked as fresh as they would have the day he got them at Southern Pines.
The good news for Boyd was that he was in excellent hands and Dr. Lyons fitted him with a cast specifically designed for riding to keep Boyd’s writs immobile enough to heal but mobile enough to get the job done on a horse. Boyd told me that the wrist felt great after the cast was put on because he couldn’t bend it in the ways that made it hurt.
A few days after getting the cast on, Boyd was back in business at Jersey Fresh and ran four horses around, finishing all of them with a grand total of 10 penalties on the XC, and all of the horses finished within the top 10.
In all my years of eventing, I have never ceased to be amazed by the toughness of eventers. This toughness comes in many forms, whether mental toughness dealing with extreme pressure, emotional toughness responding to hardship, or physical toughness in fighting through injury that sometimes borders on insanity.
Go eventing.
