Will Faudree

Q: You seem to have an awful lot on your plate? How do you prioritize and make time for everything? 

Will:  I’m a big believer in lists. I make priority lists of what I need to get done, in what order things need to get done, and I tend to stick to that until everything’s completed, before I finish the day. 

Q: Did you make plans for your horses over the winter for their spring campaigns?

Will: Yes, I did. I sat down at the end of the fall season last year, and thought about where  I wanted to head with my two advanced horses, Pawlow and Andromaque.   With the PanAm’s being a 2 star this year, obviously the main goal is the Olympics in 2012, and so I wanted to come up with the best plan to try and make that become a reality.

So the planning really started last fall, after Boekelo for Andromaque, and after Pawlow’s AEC’s, and he didn’t end up doing a Fall CCI, but the plan started to go from there with him as well.  

Then as far as their day-to-day stuff and their competitions came in, obviously we were bringing Pawlow back from a very minor injury, so that was very calculated and articulated as to how that was going to go, and then we started adding the daily schedules, and canter schedules and so on. 

Q: It must have been incredibly disappointing to have to withdraw Pawlow from team consideration after the AEC’s?

Will: It was extremely disappointing, I’d worked very hard over the summer, as we all had, and had really tried to focus on making the WEG a reality; obviously it didn’t work out the way  I wanted it to, but hindsight’s always 20/20. I think he’s going to come out this year and be a better, stronger horse for it. 

Q:  So what were the reasons behind aiming for Luhmuhlen? 

Will: Mainly due to the minor injury. I had originally thought I was going to aim for Badminton, but with Badminton being the third week of April this year, it made it very tight.  I would have had to rush him back into doing canter sets and gallop sets, and even though he’s stayed sound the whole time, and has never taken a lame step I didn’t want to rush him.  Luhmuhlen comes six weeks later, so that gives us some additional time to leg him back up.

Q: Did Boekelo give you a taste for the European events?

Will: Well, I’ve been very fortunate in my career. With Antigua I was able to go over to England, and do Badminton and Burghley, as well as the World Games in Aachen, so I got a taste of it there. I actually took Pawlow to Blenheim in 2009;  and it was a real treat and a huge honour to go on the Boekelo trip. It gives you that incredible hunger. Someone asked me if the three star level was different, or specifically more difficult than you would see over here in America, and I couldn’t disagree more, a three star is a three star – what makes it different is the 40,000 spectators, from start to finish lining the roads. That is something that we only get to experience at Rolex in this country, and I think that was one of the things that was hugely beneficial for the riders who went to Boekelo, in that it gave us a taste of the high atmosphere at these highly populated events. 

I’ve competed in Europe before so I know how close the grandstands are to the dressage ring, and I’ve been fortunate enough to go to some big events so I’ve ridden courses where the crowds are very thick, but I remember Tiana Coudray being suprised at all the people packed around the jumps so that sometimes you couldn’t even see the fences. Obviously we’d seen them walking the course, but riding on the day, you’d come around the turn and sometimes not be able to see the jump for all the spectators, and that can have a huge effect on riders, and horses, so I think it was a great experience for all of us to get to go to Boekelo. 

Q: PRO did such a great job of keeping everyone back here in the States informed of how the event was going for you all. Tell us about what you do for PRO?

Will: I do as much as I can with PRO, and I think PRO is an amazing organisation which is only going to get bigger and better, and I’m very excited to be a part of it. 

Q: And you’re organising the PRO Awards Night?

WIll: I am, in conjunction with Samantha Lendl and Hawley Bennett. It’s going to be very exciting. I dream very big, and I got this idea and told a few people about it, and they were really encouraging. My friends call me Rainman, because I have a wealth of useless knowledge, I can tell you all sorts of dates in history, Academy Award trivia, numbers, anything like that. So I had this idea for the PRO awards:  everything in our sport is points based and I thought it would be really fun for people to have nominees. I think it will open the door to a lot of other potential sponsors.  For example, if you look at the Screen Actors Guild, they have their own awards night, and it’s for actors within their own group, which is how PRO was put together, it was riders within our sport looking for advantages for the whole group. 

So I think the more we can put our sport in the public eye, with some big names, the better.  I have four performers confirmed. I think it is going to be a fun night. We don’t have a venue yet, but in 1927 the first year that they held the Academy Awards, twenty-six people attended in a very small hotel lobby in Hollywood, and if that’s what the first PRO Awards ends up being, so be it, but I think it can only grow from there.  Of course I want it big, if I could I’d get Joan Rivers up there interviewing us all on the Red Carpet! I did sit down and write out how the night’s going to run from start to finish, with performances and presentations; I have some actors to give out the awards, and I think it’s going to be a lot of fun, I hope it’s going to come off as I envision it in my mind. 

Q: You wrote a very interesting article on the USEA website about fitness.

Will: I wrote that article mainly because I got so aggravated: I kept hearing people, and professionals from our sport who don’t compete in the modern short format, saying that it’s not the same sport, and there’s not as much horsemanship, and there’s not as much time in the saddle, and it really aggravated me. I think fitness is incredibly important, and what I really tried to convey in that article was that you’ve got to know your horse, know when they can take a breath. If you don’t know your horse, then as a rider you have to be smart enough to know when to throttle back and feel and listen to what’s happening underneath you, it’s rider responsibility. 

Q: How do you do your fitness work? Do you use interval training, or gallop uphills? 

Will: I do use interval training at this time of the year. My horses, personally, have the month of November off, and then I start by doing a lot of walking, road work, and trot sets.  Then once I’m up to about 20 minutes of trot sets I’ll start adding flat work, and I’ll usually have all that accomplished by the end of December. Then starting in January I’ll go every four or five days to do canter sets, starting with three and a half minutes,building it up each time, to around the beginning of March.  From there, the horses have usually done an event or two, I won’t have gone for time, just building their muscle fitness up, and then I’d go into more sprint and speedwork rather than interval training. The same thing, I’ll gradually increase the speed and how many times I go up to build each horse up to the required level of fitness. 

Q: It sounds reassuringly old-fashioned, and methodical. 

Will: It’s very methodical. I keep a record of every horse in the barn that I fill out every day. I have Andromaque’s and Pawlow’s gallop schedules from Luhmuhlen all the way back to January. I have options, obviously, because I know I’m not going to make every gallop, and that’s why I always write in pencil (!), the only thing I write in pen are the competition dates, then I can shuffle the gallops around a bit if I need to. I have a system whereby at the top of my gallops notes I’ll grade them 1 -3, 1 meaning the horse felt incredible, 3 meaning I need to do something a little bit different. 

Missy,(Andromaque) at Boekelo was perfect. She had the fastest cool-down rate on Saturday, her heart rate was back to normal within one minute, she practically took two deep breaths when we finished cross country and that was it, and we finished ten seconds inside the time.  That’s her, she’s a very fit horse. 

Pawlow, he’s not at all fat or anything, but I feel like I’m one of the trainers on The Biggest Loser when I’m doing his fitness work, because he is SO lazy! 

Andromaque is very focused, she’s very much like Antigua in a lot of ways. She’s a bit quieter in her brain, the fitter Antigua got the more tightly wound mentally he’d get, whereas Andromaque gets more and more focused as she gets fitter.
 

Pawlow doesn’t change at all: he’s the same horse on a daily basis. You can kick him all you want to trot faster but it makes no difference! I have a pact with Pawlow. He’d been through a lot of different barns before I got him, and I even tried to sell him, but I owned him and just kept going with him and before I even knew it he’d surprised us both by reaching two star level. Before we did our first two star, I made a pact with him that I would never ask him to come to my side of the fence, and I know he doesn’t want me on his side of the fence, but we’ll just sit at the fence and have conversations when we’re together, and we have a great partnership now. It was at that  2* event that Jennifer Mosing approached me about owning him. I had met her several times teaching clinics, and that was the start of her owning horses. 

Q: Where is Andromaque headed this spring?

Will: Well, we thought long and hard about it. Boekelo was only her fourth advanced. She did Millbrook, then Richland then the AEC’s before going to Holland. On the Saturday night of the AEC’s she had a mild colic from dehydration, which is something that had never happened before. She drank about two buckets of water after cross country, but she was still dehydrated because it was so hot there, so we took notes for future reference, and now she’ll always get fluids if it’s a warm day. I didn’t want to try and take her to Kentucky, I would never want to scare her, and she did a lot last year, and I want to make sure she’s very confirmed at the three star level before I do a four star.  Having said that, she made the time around a very tough CCI 3* track, so I don’t feel like I need to do another CCI 3*, instead I’m going to start her off on some higher profile 3* CIC’s this summer, in a lead up to hopefully Burghley in the Fall.  So she’ll go to Luhmuhlen as well, but she’ll do the CIC 3* there, then go to Aachen for the CIC, and Barbury, a combined test at Gatcombe, then Hartpury, and if all that goes well she’ll go to Burghley.

Q: So you’ll be spending the summer in England.

Will: Yes, I’m very lucky, Jennifer Mosing who owns Pawlow and Andromaque, and I talked about it. Jennifer’s an incredible sponsor, but more importantly she’s an incredible friend, and we have a really great time together, and we have a lot of fun with the horses, so we’re excited about it. 

Q:  And you have two new horses this spring?

Will: I do. DHI Color Candy is an Irish horse, a preliminary level horse who’d done a couple of preliminary level events in Ireland. I just did my first event on him, and he was great, but we have a little work to do on our half halts, he doesn’t really understand the concept of half halts, but he’s a very cool horse. We’ll probably take it a little slowly at first as I get to know him and build a partnership with him. My goal is to take him to the Pan Ams: he’ll move up to Intermediate hopefully mid-Spring, and then depending on how our partnership develops, I might try to take him to Europe as well, and maybe do the Olympic Test Event, but if not, just to be over there and get a lot of intermediate miles over there would prepare him really well for the Pan American Games, if I’m selected.  The other new horse is a young, french horse called Riesling De Buissy; he’ll start competing in March and is a very cool horse too.

Q: The Westminster Dog Show, how did that happen?

Will: Jennifer, who owns my horses also owns shows dogs, and her handler, Bryan Livingstone has shown them for many years. Bryan’s wife Desiree came over to Blenheim in 2009, and we were talking after the cross country, I’d had a great go and we were all excited, and I asked her if Westminster was just like the film “Best in Show” and told her how much I’d like to go one day, and she said right there and then that they would find a dog for me to show. I’d pretty much forgotten about it until I was teaching a clinic at Jennifer’s place in January last year, and she told me that Desiree had called and had a dog for me to show at Westminster.  Brody was a yorkshire terrier, and I went into the Breed Show, and I was more nervous going into that little 8 by 10 circle with that little Yorkshire Terrier than I was leaving the start box at Kentucky. It is INTENSE, and those people don’t mess around! So I walked around in there, did my little tour, and all of a sudden they pointed at me, and I was worried I’d been eliminated, but then everyone started clapping and I realised unbelievably that I’d won. This year I won’t be showing Brodie, I’m showing a Papillon named Tiger, or so I’m told!

UPDATE: Sadly the dog Will was supposed to show didn’t qualify, but Jennifer did have two dogs win Best of Breed, and one was fourth in the Toy Group. 

Q: Before we let you go, we should give your Barn Manager Nat a big shout out, we saw her on EventingNation, riding a lovely Canter horse. 

Will: I have to say, Nat is amazing. She works to an incredible standard, and I so appreciate everything she does for my horses, and for her horses. I just can’t say enough about what a fantastic person she is. 

Q: Thank you so much for your time, I didn’t realise quite how busy you are, what with the riding, the dog show, the awards, and everything else…

Will: The eventing is my main focus, and producing these horses to best of my ability. 

Thanks again to Will for his time; you can cheer him on as a member of the Team FarmVet/Cavalor at the PRO Derby Cross on March 5th in Wellington, or at any of the spring events, and if you need an extra for your pub quiz team, Will is your man! Thank you for reading and Go Eventing!