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We present the Round 1 entries of Second Annual Blogger Contest finalists Lauren Nethery, Yvette Seger, Judith Stanton and Ellyn Willis. Click here to read the previously-posted entries of Jenni Autry, Emily Daignault, Kristen Janicki, Jen Mayfield. All entries are unedited for fairness’ sake.
Click “Read More” at the bottom of this post to view each contestant’s full entry, then leave your feedback in the comments section. Your input is important to us.
Go Bloggers.
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Lauren Nethery
Age: 24 years old
Background: In short, if it has four legs I will ride it. Horses of all shapes, sizes, and psychosis’, bulls, camels, so on, and so forth. I currently manage a farm in Lexington, KY, retired my Advanced mare in 2009 and am presently enjoying bringing my handful of an OTTB (more on this later) back to the Intermediate ranks after eighteen months off from a hoof injury. I start a lot of young horses under saddle, both for sport and for racing, teach lessons, compete horses for clients, wrangle pot-bellied pigs, and trim miniature horse feet. On a Monday.
Character-Defining Qualities: Ambitious, Adventurous, Determined
Embarrassing Tidbits: I am not an exceptionally superstitious person. This being said, I border on OCD when it comes to competition attire. Ariat’s so old that they were actually made in Italy? Check. Show coat with the armpit lining both stained and ripped to shreds? Check. Medical Armband with insert circa 1996? Check. Perhaps the strangest piece of my competition get up, however, is a remnant of my working student days gone by. The gloves that I wear in every single jumping phase in which I compete are old, gray and yellow, smelly, holey on top of patches, and clearly gave up their ghost eons ago. However, these very gloves once graced the capable hands of Bruce Davidson Sr. and were gifted to me during my winter at Chesterland South after being left upon the fender of my trailer. Delusory or not, it is my hope, nay, belief, that just a little bit of World Champion mojo still lives deep in the stitching of these gloves. After all, who doesn’t need that kind of mojo hanging around?
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Yvette Seger
Age: Too old for Young Riders, but too young for the Masters division (36)
Background: Little. Blonde. Different.
Character-Defining Qualities: I’m originally from Cleveland, so I have this strange habit of checking to make sure bodies of water are not flammable. I like the color red, and bacon is my favorite food group.
Embarrassing Tidbits: I’m not really embarrassed by it, but I am known for having full on conversations with my horse on cross-country…conversations in which I throw my voice so that it sounds like he’s answering me. And my start box song is “Straight Outta Compton.”
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Judith Stanton
Owner, novelist, editor, lifelong horsewoman. I’m part owner of Nate Chambers’ smashingly lovely new Oldenburg eventing prospect, Simon. I’m a published novelist whose fifth novel, A Stallion to Die For: an equestrian suspense, comes out this summer. An NC native, I’ve worked as a tobacco farm hand, department store clerk, medical secretary, acquisitions editor, and professor. I rescue horses and cats.
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Ellyn Willis
Bio: I’m a 23 year old college graduate who is balancing the dream of competition at the upper levels while spending my lunch break from my Grown Up job reading Eventing Nation. Recently I began searching for a new event prospect and noticed the similarities between horse shopping and dating.
The blogger contestants’ full submissions:
Lauren Nethery
The Secret to Buying an Event Horse Off The Track
In a blur of flapping stirrups, steel gray tail, and a whiff of wet horse, my champion in the making made his grand entrance into my traveling gypsy life. With a misty look in my eyes, I think back to the end of 2006. October had come to New York State and temperatures were already plummeting. The Belmont Park Fall meet was winding down and I spent my nights with visions of Ocala dancing through my head. At the track, just a few days before the end of the meet, there I was standing along the rail with some of my fellow riders watching the horses of the fifth race proceed into the gate on the turf course. “They’re all in line…and away they go” thundered the unmistakable voice of announcing icon Tom Durkin. Well, eleven of the twelve horses dashed away towards the grandstand, anyway. The lone gray in the field ‘broke in the air’, racing lingo for ‘capriole’, plunged left when he finally landed, and left his stunned jockey on his rump in the dirt. Not your average horse, the gray ignored centuries of herd instinct and made a beeline not for the rest of the horse but instead for the inside rail. In gleeful silence, I watched the gray bound over the rails of both turf tracks in fine style, knees square, bascule aplenty. Once in the infield of the track, the gray loped around assessing the situation, head up and nostrils flared. Little did I know that this was also the style he would prefer in the dressage ring. Without missing a single step, the gray skimmed along the inside rail of the inner turf track at a leisurely pace until he reached the beginning of the training track turn, made a balanced twenty meter arc left, and loped straight into the pond. It was at the moment that I knew I simply MUST own that gray. After all, he was already started over fences and clearly loved water. So, when you are at your local race track or drooling over CANTER photos online, think not of short backs, kind eyes, and clean legs. The secret is to first ascertain if he or she is already a proficient jumper and swimmer.
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Yvette Seger
My parents put me in Girl Scouts as means of procuring a direct connection to a Thin Mints dealer, but all hell broke loose when I went to the week-long camp where I was paired with a big bay mare who reared, bucked, bit and was wholly inappropriate for an 8 year old. Upon returning to civilization, I begged my parents for riding lessons. This led to us moving from the suburbs to the country so that I could keep my own horse in our backyard. Did I mention that my parents are non-horsey and that they put their faith in their 11 year old daughter to tell them what this quadruped needed to survive? Smokey, if you can read this, I’m sorry I made you eat Jell-O. I thought you’d like it.
I learned about Eventing by renting old Rolex videos from the local tack shop. I’d watch the videos, then go out into our woods where I would assemble my own “Jenny Lane Crossing” and “Head of the Lake” complexes. (To my dog Pepperoni…I’m sorry I wrapped you up in indoor/outdoor carpeting and asked you to “stand and play rolltop” under that jump, but Smokey needed to get over his fear of roll tops.) My first trip to finally watch Rolex in person is particularly memorable because it was from the covered arena at the Kentucky Horse Park that my parents made the call to purchase my first “real” eventer, Buster Brown. Buster was SO terrible at dressage, but SO brilliant on
cross-country! I would give my left arm and 6 toenails to ride that horse on cross-country again…
Like many kids, my eventing career was interrupted by C-O-L-L-E-G-E. Then grad school. Then a real job. Then the dread of fitting my no longer slim body into spandex pants. (Remember kids, spandex is a privilege, not a right!) Luckily, a Pony Club family took pity on me and offered me the ride on an aloof old TB named Roger Rabbit who convinced me that I needed to get over the spandex-phobia. Four months after getting back in the saddle after nearly 9 years of being “grounded”, I entered at A at a working trot, and have no intention of looking back.
My re-entry to the eventing world as the resident of our Nation’s Capital has resulted
in me coming to one very important realization: Most people think horse people are aliens. Very. Smelly. Aliens. So like Will Smith and the MIB, I’ve learned to hide certain parts of my existence from friends, co-workers, and family, leading to a series of tips for eventers who dwell in apartments smaller than Rafalca’s stall (she IS part of the 1%, after all). I think eventers everywhere, regardless of their provenance (city, suburbs, backwoods) will be able to relate, so here it goes…
Tip for Eventers Living in Itty-Bitty Apartments in the City #1:
Cross country vest smelling…not so fresh? Most city dwellers don’t have access to a big sink or even a hose hooked up to an outside faucet, so when MY vest starts to smell a bit funky, I just take a shower with it! So next time you’re jump judging and get a gently wafting of cherry blossom or verbena, chances are, I’ve just galloped by.
Exhibit A: Better bath companion than a rubber ducky! (PS: my grout is gross because I’m too busy eventing to care about grout)
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Judith Stanton
A Deal At Any Price, Or How to Buy A Horse You Don’t Need and Will Never Ride
Writing novels, you do research. I’ve published four historicals and put in my time. Four years ago I took on the book of my heart—a novel set in Southern Pines with an old eventing family, gearing up for the Olympics. I’ve had horses all my life, did pre-Training in the ‘80s, subscribed to COTH, PH, Equus, followed the Olympics on TV, belonging to that world in my dreams. Still, I knew a lot about horses and eventing. How hard could research be?
Hard! I scribed dressage to the ruin of my right thumb and survived hundred-degree days as a jump judge. Jimmy Wofford gave a clinic in the NC mountains, and I sat there, swathed in wool, forty degrees max for two whole days. Same frigid weather, and I was taking notes at Carolina Horse Park’s spring event, stomping to warm my feet before the Advanced division finally ran, and then a cold rain started.
Still, this June, when my buddy Nate Chambers called that he was flying to NC to look at some horses in Southern Pines, I thought, Research! And said, Stay at our house. And then, Can I come with you?
Of course, he said. Nate loves a party. And trying out five new horses was some party. I mean, can you say, scene in my next novel? Because novelists write what we know…or what we learn by doing field research.
But at Charlie Plumb’s arena, it was business at usual—busy—under a bright, toasty June sun. A boarder popped her horse over Preliminary fences. A couple of working students warmed up the sales horses. Their riding and the horses’ quality looked solid. Then Nate starting riding horses he had never seen. He took the measure of each one it seemed instantly, then pushed it a bit, to test the limits of its ability.
An 8-year-old-bay, trained as a jumper, looked clever, trappy, clearing moderately big fences, then Nate put him to a line of 3 fences at angles to each other, one stride between each one. Flawless. Show off, Susan Beebee said to Nate, laughing from the middle of the arena. But bottom line, Nate now knew what that horse could do.
The last horse was the youngest, coming five, lightly worked after an abscess last summer. Susan impressed me—she was so forthcoming about each one’s training, virtues, limitations, almost like she didn’t want to sell them. This youngster was flat-out gorgeous, black, with a tear-drop star and a narrow blaze beneath it, three white socks, an elevated, metronomic trot, a solid round canter, hindquarters fully engaged for one so young. He would top the conformation quiz in Practical Horseman any month. He’d just been started over fences, a good thing, I thought. The Spanish Riding School leaves their best prospects at pasture until their fourth year, no wear and tear on young and tender joints of which much will be asked.
Nate dismounted by the gazebo I was watching from. It was like riding Rolly, he said, Rolling Stone II, his long-time partner I have a share in.
I stepped down to meet this youngster. His eye was soft and trusting, but more, when I touched his jaw with the flat of my hand, he was so mellow, an old soul in young horse’s body, I just fell in love. Back home that night, looking at videos with Nate, my husband Peter could see it too. The loft of Simon’s stride, the pride in the arch of his neck. Exactly the young prospect Nate need and deserved.
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Ellyn Willis
Horse Shopping is Like Dating
I’ve often heard the old one-liner that goes something like this: “I shopped around more for my horse than I did for my husband!” I never quite understood how someone could spend more time shopping for a horse than the person with whom they hope to spend the remainder of their life. This is because I was happily settled with my Thoroughbred gelding, who I have owned for the last eight years and know inside and out. I had forgotten how truly diverse the field of available horses in Virginia can become. Following the retirement of my longtime partner from competition, I recently began my own hunt for my next horse, and let me say: it is true that horse shopping can be a lengthy process full of trial and error. When we choose a horse, we are selecting a partner who takes on a huge role in helping us reach our goals and fulfill lifelong dreams. And in many cases, shopping for a new horse is a like speed-dating. In one brief ride you attempt to determine the horse’s personality, training, ability, and the overall likeliness that this horse has the potential to become a partner in your quest to achieve stardom (or in my case, run a successful season at Training level). As technology and the internet continue to take precedence in advertising horses for sale, it becomes even more daunting. We must go to our website of choice, select the qualities and breeding which we most desire in our new partner, and hope that something matches our search. If you are like me, you get back a list of seven options, all beautiful. All with a beautifully long price tag following their name. After we have narrowed down our options and gazed wishfully at that $60,000 wonder-horse before clicking next, we get in our car and drive off to go meet each one, hoping that they don’t turn out to be a little more crazy than advertised.
Because I’m a recent college graduate, I have a fairly modest budget with which to purchase my next eventing superstar. I have looked at anything from two year olds with a lot of potential and six year old Thoroughbreds fresh off the steeplechase tracks to four year old warmbloods. Some I knew instantly were meant for other people, others I thought might do just fine. Sometimes they were just out of my league, pricewise. I’ve quickly learned that there is something special about each horse; it is just a matter of finding the right horse for you. And so far, I’m still looking for that horse that clicks.
