Rolex Bound

I've been totally remiss in my duties this winter and spring. Updating the blog has been seriously neglected!

Today Rolex 2014 wrapped up. William Fox-Pitt won again. Well done him, but I am still disappointed. Allison Springer was in first after the dressage and then she running a beautiful cross country course only to have a blow by at a steeply angled brush fence near the end of the course. It was heart breaking! I feel like Allison works hard and she is very often the bridesmaid, but never the bride. Plus, she lost to colic that really lovely, really expensive, horse she bought last year from non other than William Fox-Pitt. Can't she catch a break?

Arthur reminds me a little of Elliot. All the talent, but perhaps not always 100% trustworthy. This probably sounds self aggrandizing at best and maybe a little delusional. Everyone thinks their horse is going to Rolex, and at the moment Elliot and I have been struggling around intermediate. Still, I think he is a very talented beast. So we've hit a rocky spot, I'm holding on to the dream of riding him at Rolex. Even if it takes longer than expected!

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'Progress'

No horse makes progress the same way. There's no magic program to follow. No 'wiki-how' step by step guide. Some pick up everything easily and take everything in stride. Others need to learn lessons more than once. Still others learn quickly but don't get confident and so they need their hands held for a long time. It's one of the reasons training horses stays exciting. Each horse is different and each horse can be different on each day.

Since I've been riding Elliot, progress has been basically linear. He was not always confident in the beginning but he nevertheless took forward steps. He ran beginner novice. Then he ran novice. Then he ran training and then preliminary. We had a brief disruption when he strained a tendon and had colic surgery, but for the most part, we made 'progress'.

Last season he ran around a bunch of tough intermediates and a CIC2. AECs was the first blip on the radar. It was followed closely by the Fair Hill debacle. After a little winter down time, this season has been rocky. We got eliminated at Rocking Horse I, dropped to preliminary for Ocala II but still had a couple stops on cross country, and had a couple stops on the intermediate cross country at Rocking Horse III. Not progress.

Who really knows what caused the back slide. Was he ulcery? Was he sore somewhere? Or maybe he was weak? Did he lose confidence after carting me around all those intermediates last season? Were the holes in our training starting to show up? Or did we just lose our mojo after a silly mistake at AECs, getting foiled at Fair Hill, and then a lot of down time to stew about it? I don't really have an answer.

The plan for this season was to move up to Advanced in Florida. I wish that had happened, but it didn't. I'm sorry we have holes or lost mojo or whatever you want to call it, but I'm happy to be fixing the issues now rather than having them show up next year while we're trying to get qualified for something really big like Rolex. The horse is still very special and he's young. He's not lame. He looks great right now and he is fitter and getting stronger than ever. Maybe the setback was good. More training. More preparation. Another season of intermediate will only make him better. We can plan to move up in the fall.

Progress with horses isn't always linear. As my dad reminded me today, it isn't even always 'progress'. You just keep moving.

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Riding with Lucinda

The weekend was pretty miserable. Wet. Cold. Rainy. Not really the weather we were hoping for, but we got to ride with Lucinda Green!

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Mississippi Mud

Mississippi winters are no fun. My northern friends will probably roll their eyes and curse me for what I'm about to say, but I'd almost rather be in New England. I know it is brutally cold and there is snow, but at least the ground freezes and most places have indoors. Down here it's just soggy so we're just SOL.


The rain starts in November and doesn't end until sometime in May. The ground gets saturated. Worse yet, the soil is mostly clay so you don't just get muddy, you get caked in clay. It's like you and your horses are wearing concrete boots. It's no joke; neither Elliot nor I find it amusing. He gets cranky and tired of slipping and sliding. I get tired of pushing a wheelbarrow through six inches of mud.


There isn't really a good place to gallop or jump so conditioning is tricky. We do a lot of trotting down the road, which keeps the horses relatively fit, but is a little like playing Russian roulette. We go over a couple bridges and often drivers don't slow down much. Even the school bus tries to engage us in a good game of chicken. I forfeit every time.

I cannot wait to go to Ocala. We are counting down the days! Just under two weeks.

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Stop to Smell the Flower

Elliot faired pretty well on the journey back south after the disappointment of Fair Hill. He got about a couple weeks of vacation since there was nothing else for he really needed to do this year. It seemed well deserved after all the shipping and competing and general stress of the trip and the season as a whole. We haven't done anything particularly strenuous since coming home. Mostly hacking and some light long and low flat work.

I'm a big supporter of giving upper level horses a break. In the past, the competition season was shorter. The long format three day was the pinnacle of the season. You worked up to it, and then your horse had a vacation on the off season. Now, with short format and more three days, you can run many FEI events in one season. Furthermore, there isn't really an off season anymore. You can travel all over the country and find an event at almost any time of year.

Getting horses fit and ready to run is hard work. Smellie only has a six or seven hour work week, but those can be some hard hours. There's lots of drilling and lots of galloping and lots of jumping.

One night this week we just wandered and watched as a pretty spectacular double rainbow appear over Redbud Farm. Sometimes you just have to stop and smell the flowers!

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Un-Fair Hill?

I was so looking forward to putting my mistake at the AECs behind me and proving to myself that we were ready for our first CCI2 at Fair Hill. I didn't get the chance.

Most people know what happened to us, especially since there was an article in the Chronicle of the Horse and it appeared all over Eventing Nation.

For the most part, people were very supportive. There were the few that tut tutted me and Betsy. We got a few like, 'shame on that owner for trying to run a lame horse' or 'if the vet said the horse wasn't fit to run, the owner should not run the horse'. I would never run Smellie had I thought he wasn't right. I have scratched him from events because I have been worried about his best interest.

In this case, I truly believe he was fine. He was going better than he ever has. He was fit and ready to run. Here's how our first Fair Hill adventure went:

We arrived at Fair Hill on Monday and Elliot was in great form despite the long trip north and the extra couple days hanging at Heidi's Hanoverian Inspection over the weekend. We hacked on Monday after arriving, and took a flat lesson with Leslie Law on Tuesday. Elliot was phenomenal. Leslie said he was moving and working much better than he was even a month before at the AECs. We worked for about an hour pretty hard.

Wednesday morning I went for a long hack before the job and he felt good. Dougie Hannum worked on Smellie in the morning and said his body felt great! He didn't even have anything to adjust. In the jog Elliot was very slow to move off away from the other horses and also the ground jury. So I was essentially dragging him down the jog strip. He was held along with a how slew of other horses.

This is where things went bad. The vet in the hold box palpated his legs and then flexed Elliot's left hind as if he were performing a pre-purchase exam. Since I was trotting I couldn't really see what was happening but I basically knew he trotted off positive to the flexion. The vet in the box told me that the joint itself looked good and he wasn't tender to palpation, but that Elliot was very lame and that I should just 'go home'. Betsy and Dougie were standing outside the holding area. We were all totally caught off guard and since no one knew quite what to do in this situation, I withdrew.

It was not until I got back to the barn that I found out those types of 'active' flexion tests are illegal in the hold area. The vet is allowed to flex for range of motion and palpate for tenderness, but actively flexing and trotting off is explicitly illegal.

And in all honesty, how many of the horses competing at that level could have flexed positive in that situation? I would hazard a guess that most would flex positive to some degree. I am especially suspicious of this considering all 6 of the horses illegally flexed in the holding area by the same veterinarian all reacted positive. Any horse, if flexed firmly enough will give a positive reaction (see the Behind the Bit blog post summarizing studies concerning the reliability of flexion tests). Since the vet didn't look at Elliot trot on a circle or flex the other leg or even see him trot on a straight away before flexing him, I question the validity of this exam.

Upon finding out that procedure in the hold area was illegal, I spoke with the show office and tried to get in touch with the TD and the President of the Ground Jury in order to make a formal inquiry. After over an hour of waiting, the TD called me on the phone and essentially said there was nothing he could do because I withdrew from the competition despite anything the vet did or said, illegal or not. He also said, that the head vet knew there was something illegal happening in the holding area and she had addressed it. What he didn't say was that it's was a bit of a catch 22 though; if I had represented against the suggestion of the holding box vet, I might have been eliminated or worse yellow carded like one of the kids at young riders this year. And would Elliot have looked okay after being flexed so hard? I don't really know.

We packed up and left early the next morning for home.

We got home Friday night and first thing Monday morning we took Smellie into the vet for a full lameness exam. Dr. Cate Mochal found nothing behind. He did not flex positive to stifle flexions and he was only mildly positive to the hock and fetlock flexions. She said his reaction was so slight, she would not even recommend hock injections.

So, we were all very disappointed. Elliot and I did not get the chance to show off what we had been preparing for all year. We lost a lot of money, but worse we lost a lot of time. I still need a CCI2 in order to run a CCI3 and there isn't another CCI2 until much later in the fall. This sets our progress back. We can still move up to advanced in Florida, but we will have to go back an collect that pesky CCI2 mid-season.

I know the vet was doing what he thought was best. I understand and appreciate that he did not want anyone, equine or human, to get hurt. What upsets me is that if I had broken an FEI rule, I would have been fined and suspended from competition. What happens to him? As far as I know, nothing. He even said he would flex horses again given the opportunity. Maybe the system is broken. I don't know. I have not given an alternative much careful though. However, I do know until the rule officially changes, what this vet did was wrong and it shouldn't happen.

My bad for not knowing the rules. Expensive lesson and a major MAJOR bummer. Hope next time will be better.

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Bad Call

Seems as though time has gotten away from me. Fall has flown by. I cannot believe we are already on the way to Fair Hill. I can't tell sometimes if the feeling in my stomach is excitement or terror. It's a toss up; either one seems appropriate at any certain time.

A couple weeks ago weeks ago we took off to Texas (my first time in the Lone Star State) to go to a clinic with Leslie Law and then head to Texas Rose Horse Park for their first American Eventing Championships.

The clinic was spectacular! Leslie had a lot of great insights into Elliot. He got me working Elliot over his back in a way I haven't felt before. I am very excited at the opportunity to work with him again while in Florida this winter.

The AEC didn't go as well as I would have hoped. It wasn't a disaster by any means, but it revealed some holes and I was a little let down after the high of the clinic the week before.

Dressage was respectable. We scored under 40 in a very stiff field. The comments were more or less what I expected to see. We need more bend in the lateral work, there's some tension in the walk, and the canter-walk transitions are often abrupt and/or on the forehand.

The cross country course was solid. Just what I wanted before Fair Hill. The first five fences were small and straightforward. Fence six was the first combination on course and the first serious question. It was a hefty table, six strides (if ridden direct) to a narrow, right pointed corner. From that point, there were a series of very good questions including big angled roll tops, two water complexes (the first a barn-bank out-one stride-skinny and the second big brush-drop in-bending line-tall, wide skinny out), and another corner combination that mirrored the first but this time with a tall but wide chevron in. The course eased you in, tested your mettle, and then let you down.

I felt pretty confident walking the course. I knew the first combination was going to be a very good test. It was the first combination on course and right corners can be tough as we struggle with right drift. On the first walk, it seemed obvious to jump the right hand side of the table and put a little bend back to the corner. On each successive walk, my line got straighter and straighter. It turned out to be a bad call. I made a tough question tougher than it needed to be and also something we weren't quite ready to do. When I got to it on course, he jumped the table well and I rode my plan. I'm not sure whether he misunderstood the question, or if the right drift caught up to up or if we just weren't settled at that point on course (as he was breathing fire on that particular day), but regardless, we had a blow by. Then I let myself get frazzled and didn't collect myself or him enough for the second attempt resulting in another blow by. At that point we picked off the option, which was a left pointed corner, and went on. The rest of the course rode well. I hit a flag with my left knee on the second corner combination but he went. All the other combinations rode great.

After the trouble on XC, I was really hoping for a clean show jumping round to end the weekend on a high note. It was not meant to be. Elliot actually jumped quite well, and my eye was on, but instead of a 12' stride I was on something like a 14' stride, which meant we jumped a little flat. He just breathed on a few of them and they fell.

We got up into the triple digits, but we finished!

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what's in a name?

Many people ask me where he got the name L.E. Font. Most assume it's something fancy. Maybe it relates to the breeder like RF 'so and so' or our very own Calysta MWF?

No. It's mostly meant as an inside joke and references Smellie's formative years.

Elliot was not a naturally brave horse. He was skittish as a baby and a couple incidences over fences made him certain the world, and particularly the jumps, were out to get him.

It started at one of his first events when a dirt bike backfired at the the show jump in gate as Elliot was coming around to finish. For lack of a better word, it scared the poop out of him.

Next came the jumping at night episode a couple weeks later. It probably goes without saying, but I want it on record that it is never a good idea to jump horses in the dark without lights, even over the bright white rails. Elliot ended up galloping back to the barn with a flower box bracelet. After that, he wouldn't go anywhere near a jump or a pole or a standard for a long time.

Betsy likes to tell stories about jumping Elliot at Redbud and spending hours running through small verticals or putting eight very squirrely strides in a three. She finally got him to get near the jumps by putting a pole in his stall so that he had to walk over is to get his food.

Even at our first event, he wouldn't go near most of the cross country jumps and I thought, what have I gotten myself into?!

Basically, the name came from Elliot never forgetting what's happened in the past. 'Elephant' didn't seem appropriate since I don't think of elephants as particularly light on their feet or cat-like, though they do have a certain majesty and grace about them. L.E. Font, however, somehow seemed to fit.

This personality now works to my advantage. Once he realized jumping was fun he was ALL about it. Furthermore, you only have to show him a question once and like an elephant, he never forgets!

So when you hear his name announced, it's okay to chuckle. Neither Elliot nor I take ourselves too seriously. We're just doing what we know and finally having fun!

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