Championships, the Olympics, And Other Musings

After two weeks of working my tail off, I am finally finding time to spend a little time catching you all up on my adventures.

Over the last threeish weeks, the North American Junior & Young Rider Championships have consumed my life. To say I basically lived at the Horse Park except for a few hours of sleep every night would be no exaggeration as I put over 125 hours in at work during our last two week pay period.

While the show only lasted five days, I quickly learned that a lot goes into setting up a show of this caliber. Over a week before the show started, we were off and running with long days and nights to get all the last minute preparations done.

By the time the actual show rolled around last Tuesday, I had already clocked in a week and a half of continuous work with no real relief in sight. Thankfully, I had prepared myself for a tiresome and busy week because I literally put in at least 14 hours of work every day during the show except for our last day (Sunday). Even after four days of being back to my regular schedule, I am still exhausted. However, it was literally the time of my life getting to see world class horses compete and experience the world of upper level riders, even if most of them are teenagers.

Of course, as we were wrapping up the Championships (something that we are still working on), part of our office was preparing to go to London for the Olympics. 

Our High Performance Communications Director left on Tuesday for the U.K. after playing event director all week for the show. I'm still not sure how she is pulling it all off, I think she is the energizer bunny in disguise because she was literally the first person to get there in the morning and last person to leave at night. The bonus? She also came in to work up until she had to be at the airport to fly out to London.

Today, the other group of London goers prepared to set off on the trip to the Olympics so the office was a bit hectic with show wrap up and last second instructions for the next few weeks. The good news is that I was given two new Olympic "swag" items to wear and that always makes my day. 

I also got my next task for the next few weeks, or even months, as we redo the Rule Book for 2013. I'm not 100% sure what is all going to go into my part of the project and have a meeting tomorrow to clarify a bit more so I'll hold off on totally trying to explain that for now. 

All I know is that it means I get to play in InDesign again, something I loved messing with in college so it will be fun to be "reunited" with the program (even though I have it on my home computer).

As for the other musings that I posted in the title of this blog...

The other night my roommate and I went out to dinner and were talking about my time here. We realized I've been here almost 2 months. While I haven't done too much in social circles (I'm still working on that), I've had the time of my life and am trying to figure out how I can stay here after the internship is done but that's another adventure in itself.

My life is currently all kinds of exhausting but the opportunity I've been granted is amazing and I look forward to continuing on with it in the next few months, if not the next few years.

Live from my bed in Kentucky,

Mel

Living And Breathing the Business

Welcome to the end of another hot week in Lexington. Usually I'm a fan of hot weather but when stepping outside and instantly getting drenched with sweat happens, it's time to reevaluate my fandom. When even lifelong citizens of Kentucky are complaining, I don't feel so bad though.

But this post isn't just for complaining about the heat, I promise.

Before I moved here, I looked at all the sales dates to try and figure out which ones I could attend. While most of the sales are actually during the week (a not so fun thing for me since I work Monday thru Friday), they have viewings during the weekends. The first sale in my sights was the July Fasig-Tipton sale. I've never went to an auction there as last November, we only went to see horses at Keeneland, not over across town (to put it in perspective, Keeneland is three miles from my house, F-T is about 15-20). 

It looked like the heat was again going to foil my plans for going to the "kickoff" sale of the auction season. Yesterday it was much too hot to do much of anything and that was when I planned on going and the forecast showed that it was going to stay hot for the rest of the week. But when I woke up today and my phone said it was only 89* out, I decided to take the chance of going, even when the other two weather sources said it felt more like 100*.

I'm not going to lie, my desktop background made me feel like a slacker if I didn't go (more on that later), so that had a major part in it and I'm glad I did. I got to see some awesome horse flesh and even talked with grooms, buyers, and sellers during the 2 1/2 hours I was there. I took over 1,300 pictures and spent a few hours this afternoon sorting them out and putting them on the web. I'm about half way through so tomorrow night I get to do the process again.

Now back to my desktop background. 

When I went to the Kentucky Derby Museum a few weeks ago when I was up in Louisville, I took a picture of one of the many quotes on the walls. If you know me, you know I'm a HUGE Bob Baffert fan, so it's no surprise that it's his quote I took a picture of. The quote goes like this:

"If you're gonna be successful, you have to live and breathe this business."

Since my life right now pretty much revolves around horses, I feel like I fit that quote pretty good. However, when I was at breakfast with a friend a few weeks ago, one of their friends that stopped by our table gave me some advice on getting into the thoroughbred side of things (the place I ultimately want to go), 

"You have to constantly be seen and let them get familiar with you."

He was referring to everyone in the business because let's face it, the racing industry is not easy to get into without help (thankfully I have a wonderful support system behind me). So when I lollygagged about trying to come up with an excuse not to go out to the auction grounds today, I just felt more and more guilty. It wouldn't just be missing a day of seeing the future stars of our sport, it would also be a missed opportunity to get myself a glimpse of the inside of the industry, even if it didn't have any real effect today.

After all, good, professional exposure can't hurt. And I had a blast at the auction so it helped even more. Every day I spend doing something on the racing side of things, the more I realize that one day, I want to end up in the industry. My next task is to figure out how I can go from the unknown person walking around with a camera at the sales to someone people recognize. I have a feeling that may be a little tougher than I would like it to be. 

And for a small update on the internship front: This week was a lot of last second stuff to get done, especially since it was only three days of work. The eventing team was named early in the week so I worked on the media guide for that (I had helped with jumping last week), then I did our nominations for athletes of the month, which was kind of fun to do.

I've been trained to not put any opinion into anything, but this exercise was one where I had to make the riders sound even more awesome then they are. It was one of those creative type of tasks that let me escape my journalism ways for a bit. Then Friday was basically doing all the Young Riders stuff that needs to be done with the show only a week away. It was a pretty simple and straight forward week but it was really nice to have a steady stream of work to do, it made the days go by much quicker.


Until next time,
Mel

A week of frustration and opportunity

As I sit through my first big storm in Kentucky, I figure it's a good time to blog.

Not much has changed since my last post on the internship. I finished all of the bios I talked  about last time, including adding the edits that our proof reader said needed to be done. The website is up and running now (http://www.usefnetwork.com/featured/Olympics2012/rosters/eventing.aspx) so there's not much for me to do other than make sure it doesn't go offline.

This week, my only real assignment was writing a press release on Monday and Tuesday. Other than that, I once again sat around waiting for work to come my way. I'm hoping that after this week, I'll have a lot more to do with the Young Riders Championships coming to the Horse Park next week and then the Olympics starting up right after that. But we'll see.

We've also started a "fitness challenge" at work where we can go so many miles on a bike, walking, or swimming that started today and goes until August 11 (around the end of the Olympics). Because I've been looking for a motivator to work out and get in shape/healthier, I jumped on this chance and started working out today. My "goal" is three miles a day on the bike to get the gold medal but after going over 10 miles today, I think I'll be way over that. 

Plus, after the challenge is over, I should be better off since it takes three weeks to form a habit and the challenge is a little under six weeks so I should still be going at that point. I have a fitness goal that I want to reach by October so hopefully this is the right step towards that.

There's not much more to report on so Until next time,

Mel