Project Shadbelly

During the six months of chemo and additional months of secondary surgery recovery, I had a lot of time to think about my life and the choices that had led me through the first 50 years of my life.  Many people will tell you Cancer is a terrible, scary disease, and, it is, but, for me, finding out I had Colon Cancer and dealing with the resulting treatments gave me the opportunity to slow down and really look at who I had become and, more importantly, who I wanted to be and what I wanted to accomplish in the second half of my life.

I love horses.  I spend a hugely disproportionate amount of time thinking about breeding picks, program goals, strengths and weaknesses of our mare base, etc., etc.  Although I've always been interested in breeding and genetics, other than a two-and-a-half year period of time during grad school, I have always ridden.  One of our primary reasons for starting our Warmblood breeding program was to breed me a horse of the quality we couldn't afford to buy 25 years ago.  Well, over the last couple of decades we have bred some of the best KWPN horses in North America; however, until Colon Cancer gave me the opportunity to refocus, I wasn't pursuing my original goals of partnering with one of our gorgeous creations to start working up the levels.  Well, in August of 2011, two weeks before I was cleared to start exercising or causing myself much physical strain, I started riding again.

Princess:  ZaVita SSF (Contango x Elcaro x Belisar).  My wife gave me a breeding to Contango to use on LaVita, my favorite mare, with the stipulation I would keep the resulting foal as my riding horse.  That was Father's Day, 2003.  Princess was born in late May of 2014.  Literally, she was born on my feet.  I came home from teaching school during my prep block because I knew LaVita was close to foaling.  When I got to the pasture behind the barn, I found her pacing back and forth, wanting to come in.  I opened the gate, and she went directly into the barn.  She was clearly in labor.  She went into her stall and started pawing.  Within moments, she lay down in the straw and started to deliver.  When I saw the white bag, I went in, broke it open to clear the feet, and added a little pull when she pushed.  Moments later, Princess was lying on my feet. Of course, I fell in love immediately.  She was up and nursing in under and hour, and I was back at work in time for my next class. That fall, she was first premium and top foal in New England.

We had Princess started by Joe Forrest when she was three.  Joe's comments almost broke my heart.

"She's a nice horse. Nothing too special.  Just a plain, simple, safe riding horse."

The KWPN-NA jury seemed to agree with Joe.  Although she went ster, the jury thought she didn't lift enough in her movement to be keur-eligible.  I was, and am, stubbornly convinced that this mare is more special than people were seeing, so we both sent her for more dressage training and bred her. Long story short, by the time I was finishing chemo and surgeries, Jane Hannigan had graciously taken Princess into training to get her ready for me to start riding.  Princess and I spent the next two years with Jane. Eventually, the hour-and-a-half drive to Littleton, MA, just became too much for me to manage.  Every time I rode, I had to set aside a five-hour block of time, and I was riding between four and six days per week.  So, we moved Princess home.

I'm now almost five months into riding in my "own program."  It is a work in progress.  I'm starting this blog to chronicle my crazy adventure.  Not that I really know, because I've never trained a horse this far up the training scale, but I think Prix St. George is within our realistic grasp in the next year to year and a half.  Welcome to the journey!