Hudson + Beth: Year One

The average temperature for the past couple weeks has been below 20 degrees Fahrenheit, so I’ve spent more time looking ahead to eventing season than I have living in the moment. The moment is COLD. The moment is stuck doors and icy buckets. The moment is trudging through knee deep snow to put hay out in the pastures. The future, though, can only be warmer, beginning with a training trip to Florida in April. 

Last year, all my twenty-something year old dreams came true when my boarder Jessica proposed that she buy an upper level event horse for me to compete. I ecstatically agreed. We hunted for just the right horse, flew back and forth from Florida trying various creatures and doing PPEs, ultimately finding Hudson Street with Kyle and Jen Carter. Jessica had just flown back home so didn’t get to meet him, but, graciously, trusted my judgment that while he was “a LOT of horse” he was also the one. From the time I threw a leg over, I knew he was what I’d been looking for, and had tried to create in my much-more-affordable OTTBs all these years. 

I planned a trip back down to take a last lesson from Kyle and hang out for Hudson’s PPE. Both went swimmingly (I vehemently recommend the vet we utilized, Magda Stewart. Thanks for sending us her way, Donahues!) and we had him shipped up to us in Buffalo in February (poor guy). He felt like a million bucks despite the shocking weather transition. After a couple weeks, though, he started acting up at the mounting block. Then he became cranky about grooming, and any touch around his girth area. I assumed ulcers and we treated him aggressively for ulcers to no avail. We tried chiro and Bemr. I read something online about monoflaps and short girths causing side pain and I switched tack. If I remember correctly, this coincided with some time off and muscle pain relief of some sort. Finally, we pulled blood and realized that between the time we did his PPE and his first couple weeks in the tundra of Buffalo, he had contracted Lyme disease. 

Jessica and my daughter, living their best life watching Rodrigo Pessoa compete at WEC while eating French Pastry

We treated the Lyme disease, but his levels remained pretty stagnant. The rest of the season, and even now sometimes, I wonder “is this a training issue, or is this the Lyme?” His first rider in the states is someone we now know was an animal abuser. Kyle had patiently worked through a lot of Hudson’s anxiety and mistrust from those early rides, but it’s still there. Hudson is DETERMINED to do the right thing at all times, to a fault. By season’s end, I actually took it as a ‘win’ when he had a couple refusals out cross country to inspect the obstacles I was asking of him instead of just holding his breath and hurtling himself over, as we’d started the season doing. 

All this to say, I’m beyond lucky to have Hudson in my life and Jessica’s support. Our ‘career’ together had a slow start, but it’s giving me time to get my upper level sea legs back and also to iron out some weaknesses in my 43 year old body. Thanks to USEA’s stricter-than-the-early-00’s policies on moving up, I will spend another season building my partnership with Hudson and getting all my body parts and my brain back into action, beginning with a training level run at the Ocala International. How will that go after months of training in a 55'x120' indoor? Stay tuned!

Hudson's Eagerness to Please (and determination to remind me that he's competed at Intermediate) summed up in one photo. (Photo Cred: Brant Gamma at Millbrook)

By Day Three of our First Jumper Show, he was breathing and cheerful