Happy New Year

“In the coming year, may you dream outrageously, live exceptionally, and embrace uncertainty. Meet your challenges with your head held high, and take joy in the doing of it. May you be brave enough to take risks, and have the determination to make your dreams come true. May you have confidence in your beliefs and faith in your potential. And most of all, savor each day, each hour, each moment, and enjoy the beauty of this amazing world around you.” – Phyllis Dawson

This quote from my former coach and forever mentor, Phyllis Dawson, really captures the spirit of what the next four months will involve.

Faux Indigo and I are chasing down the dream to represent this amazing country that we are so lucky to live in. We are trying to get noticed by the Pan Am selectors for Eventing. Our first step is to put in some results that can’t be ignored. Canada needs a really strong team for the 2015 Toronto Pan American Games. Our goal as riders is to give the selectors such a depth of strong candidates that it makes their job tough. I want to see Canada win gold at the Pan Ams!

For us, this means we will be traveling back and forth to Aiken, South Carolina. We are moving the whole team south where we will be training and competing for the next three months. I am lucky to have eight horses with me this year. Faux Indigo and Chiron are my two main competition horses. The rest are really talented and exciting young horses that are going down to further their education and experience.

December has been a month of organizing, packing, logistics and more packing. Trying to make it as affordable as possible and as easy as possible has been the greatest challenge. Our plan is to take the first load straight through, drop them at the farm with my friend, Melissa Huntsburger, sleep (hopefully) then turn around and come back again. Luckily for me, I have 28 hours of new book tapes to add to my library of audiobooks (maybe not so exciting for my co-pilot).

The next time I blog I will tell you about the trips down and back, our new base “camp,” and what Aiken is all about!