I have the soul of a rider. I was born with it. I’m from the Greenspring Valley in northern Maryland. It’s where Sagamore Farms is — when I was a toddler, my mother would avoid driving by that farm because I would scream I wanted a horse. It would start as soon as we got near that farm. I didn’t really learn to ride until I was 19 or 20. I had a boyfriend, and he was like, “If you’re gonna be with me, you gotta learn to ride.” I took to it like a duck to water. I didn’t keep the boyfriend but kept the horses.
[Horse trainers] make the decisions for conditioning the horse, for getting the horse fit. It’s like a personal trainer. They pick out the races the horse will run in; they decide the level the horse runs in, and if there is an owner, they deal with the owners. If they don’t gallop the horse themselves, they tell the exercise rider what he’s to do with the horse that day. So they make all the decisions, but also anything that happens is their fault. If the jockey screws up, it’s the trainer’s fault —he picked the jockey.
Not all trainers gallop their own horses. I would guess that most of them don’t. Like the guys in the Kentucky Derby, most of them don’t gallop their own horses. I was small, so I galloped my own. I rubbed my own, groomed them. I did everything but ride them in races. I won a stake race, which is this fabulous thing, and 15 minutes later I was in the stable shoveling manure, picking the stalls out. It was glamorous for that moment, but the glamour and the highs in horse racing, but also [with] horse showing, is fleeting, and the work that goes into it is incredible. Racing [is] better, because you actually get money when you win races; [with horse showing] the money and the dedication and the work is there, but you get a ribbon.
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It’s not a job; it’s a way of life. When I first met my husband, we did normal human things like go on cruises and stuff. But then I got horses. My husband says, “I’ve never seen anybody work so hard to make no money.” My husband’s normal; he knows when holidays are. We never know, ’cause we have to work seven days a week. They’re here. They’re dependent on you. You can’t really do anything but horses.
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