I started back at the farm after the Triple Crown and was riding on a high. I think my strength in life is definitely photography (at least that is where I am most confident) so spending three and a half weeks photographing American Pharoah's Triple Crown preparations followed by his post-victory movements had my head a little inflated.
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| Me when returning to the farm after a successful Triple Crown season. |
From just a general "everyone will understand" viewpoint, I thought I was in pretty decent shape this year when starting back at the farm. While I was much more prepared than when starting yearling prep season last year, I'm only half joking when I say that instead of spending thousands of dollars on weight loss camps, people should get a month long job on a farm. You kind of know how hard cleaning stalls is but you don't realize how much you work your muscles cleaning buckets until you get to the final barn and your arms don't want to move. But it is much more fun than working out at a gym so it's a win-win there.
Wrangling foals is also a workout in itself. Perhaps weirdly, getting pulled around by foals is fun to me because I feel like I've accomplished something when I finally get them to stand in one place somewhat calmly. Plus, this usually leads to me learning something so it's a double perk. Honestly, most people say they hate school and learning but I'm always trying to pick brains at the farm to learn more and when I'm recruited to hold a foal or mare I always take the opportunity to soak in everything going on. I'd be fine holding foals/broodmares all day if it led to me learning more about their care and how/why things happen with them.
I've never really voiced my desire to learn more about the office and non-horse handling tasks but it is definitely something I am interested in. Booking mares, picking stallions, turning in live foal reports, ect ect has always been a major curiosity to me and something that I think I may be really interested in doing more of.
This summer, I've been given the task of registering the markings for all the foals and I've made it more complicated than it should be. I've registered horses with other registries but The Jockey Club is more thorough then those and ask for things I've never thought of before. One example is the cowlicks on horses.
I've never really thought about them in the past but as it was explained to me, they are like a horse's "finger prints." I'm sure I have frustrated the man going over the cowlicks I put in because I went from not knowing that horses have cowlicks on both sides of their neck in addition to on their head (there's your random fact of the day) to overexplaining the cowlicks because I was afraid of giving too little detail.
I've also explained markings more thoroughly than they have to be so it's taken me three weeks to relax on the information I fill in for markings and not put in exact details like a star slightly caving in on one side but popping back out a little higher. That learning curve has definitely been stressful and caused my confidence to waver over the past few weeks. But I'm hoping that now that I've gotten it down, the rest of the horses will go smoothly and I can stop raising the blood pressures of those who have to deal with the stuff I enter (sorry, guys!)
Next up on my task list is getting foal photos and I am psyched about that. Like I said earlier, taking pictures gives me a lot of confidence so I'm excited. I'm still in awe that I am getting a chance to do all of this stuff on the farm and learn everything that goes into setting the next generation of racehorses up for success, both in the barn and the "office." It's literally something I dreamed of doing for years and I'm so thankful to those who are giving me the opportunity.
