United States Eventing Association

This is the 23rd entry in the USEA’s Member Story Series. Help us reach our goal of over 300 stories – email your story to Leslie.

My name is Julia Hill. I live in Reston, Virginia. Though I’d been riding off and on since I was seven, I tumbled onto my current love of Eventing 13 years ago…when I was 35. Most amazing, even to me, is that I did my very first event – ever – last year. Yup, this is a story of unrequited love.

A lot of this appalling gap is explained by the fact that I work for the State Department and have spent many of those years overseas. It was, in fact, the day before I left for my first tour in Warsaw, Poland that I went to the first event I’d ever seen. I watched another student of my dressage instructor’s pilot her enormous horse Danny over wee jumps in the field after a similarly fun run at stadium. WHY HAD I NOT DISCOVERED THIS BEFORE? This was what I wanted to do!

I’d come up like a lot of us, riding hunters as a kid. When I rejoined the equestrian ranks in my thirties, I’d ended up pretty squarely in the discipline of dressage. I liked it enormously, but I missed the thrill of jumping. My dressage instructor had once been an eventer and I begged her to let me start jumping again. She relented, I was immediately rejoined with an old love, the thrill of it, the feeling of flight. I don’t need to tell YOU, do I?

But here I was, hours from getting on a plane to begin a two-year tour in Poland, no horse of my own anyway. It was like the guy who sees the girl sitting in a train, falls instantly in love and the train pulls away. He never sees her again. Story of my life.

I was lucky though. I rode as much as I wanted in Poland, but did little jumping. As I was able to ride at a sales barn for free, I had to confine myself to the horses they wanted me to ride (youngsters), who were still learning straight, forward, and calm. While I was in Poland, though, I glommed onto the European pentathalon: showjumping, fencing, swimming, shooting, and running. Every single sport I’d ever participated in! However, no horse.

My next overseas assignment was Damascus, Syria. During home leave and language training, I rode and worked at the only place I had connections and was plunged back into the dressage box again. This only gave me a couple of months to ride before going off to the Mid East.

Three years in Syria were full of work for a security professional. I had little time to ride. I found one place which belonged to a family connected to top levels of the Syrian government. They had imported three Dutch warmbloods from Europe, who arrived very well schooled, fat, sassy, and I could have eaten them with a spoon. I got a few decent rides from these boys, but their training was soon drained from them by kids more interested in bombing around the ring as fast as they could go. Work prevented me going more than once a week and soon, they were ruined completely.

When I returned to the US, I bought my first horse, Manhattan Punch. She is still part of my family. A lovely and huge (17.2H) bright bay with socks and black points, she put flesh on my dream of Eventing. She was calm, straight and forward and seemed to really enjoy the job of jumping. Then she colicked, badly, and had the surgery. For the next year, while I studied Russian for another overseas tour in Kazakhstan, she recovered and grew up in South Carolina. I left in her the care of friends and supported her financially while I was overseas.

I wish I could tell you I rode a lot in Kazakhstan, but my mother taught me lying is wrong. I rode a very little and not very enjoyably. I just wanted to get home to my horse and EVENT. FINALLY.

I returned home again and resumed my dressage studies, but I was adamant that I was going to Event. Punch was now seven and though she was (and remains) a sweet, beautiful, and willing soul, I began to feel she did not have the athleticism of a serious event horse. I began to look for a second horse.

I ended up purchasing a half-share of a (former) friend’s horse. He was a 17H Dutch Warmblood, and though I had long said he was too much horse for me, she insisted that he wasn’t. I enjoyed doing dressage with him, as he was a more talented horse than I’d ever ridden before, but our outing in the jump field revealed him to be a “launcher.” It didn’t help that I hadn’t jumped a single fence in five years. After thirty days with him, I told this woman I didn’t want to retain my share. She said she would re-purchase it from me. I’m still waiting for that money.

I began to work with Punch, moving her to a professional event rider’s barn, to see if we could go at the very low levels. She was actually doing pretty well, when she started stopping. Not Punch’s habit to do so. The vet diagnosed OCD. She had the surgery, but the surgeon had to leave a growth in her stifle which was buried too deeply in healthy cartilage. The following spring, Punch and I resumed our preparations. After a horrible cross-country school full of uncharacteristic stops and later, what we all thought initially was a hoof abscess, Punch’s feet were discovered to have serious changes to both sets of navicular and coffin bones and continued lameness in the OCD-affected leg. Poor girl never got started. She was nine at the time the final verdict was turned in.

I knew I wasn’t going overseas again, so I resumed my search for another horse and put Punch out to pasture. Over the prior two years, I’d sat on no less than 30 horses, driving my truck to Pennsylvania, Delaware, eastern shore Maryland, southern Virginia, and Aiken just to do check rides. I was exhausted and more broke than before, but I still had enough for a decent horse and nothing was going to stop me now.

Just when I thought I’d seen every event horse under $20,000 on the east coast, I saw a handsome bright bay gelding with black points (sound familiar?) on a website I cruised routinely. Mm. 16H. A little small for a 5’8” woman, but he was well represented by the groom of a nationally-ranked rider, so I went. What a little motorbike he was, when compared to my aircraft carrier-sized mare! He was a gentleman, but he made you ride. I rode him twice, the second time was a cross-country school. He took my heart between his little pony-sized hooves that beautiful day in May. We were permanently joined at the hip two weeks later.

He had done some Preliminary, but tons of Training. His resume had to be more than mine. I was 47-years-old at the time I bought him and I had enough nerve left to fill the eye of a needle. I needed my horse to be smarter, uh, more experienced than me. We started training for Surefire. He popped an abscess. Then, when the farm sold and my trainer moved to Millwood, Pilot and I went looking for new digs. We landed at Angelica Run in Vienna.

There wasn’t much time between our move to Vienna and the end of the Eventing season – I had to move fast. I bought a trailer and had the good fortune to have a fellow boarder who was at the stage of her Eventing career (and life), so we teamed up and went to our first combined test in Culpeper.

Pilot was hotter than the blue flames of hell for our dressage test, but it made him EXPRESSIVE. We scored pretty well. The “stadium” course was really a miniature cross country, fences stuck into the hills and culverts in a surprisingly inviting way, but they were absolutely tiny (“Green as Grass”). We trotted everything and he was much more relaxed. We stayed to do Beginner Novice as well. The short almost non-interval between our first jump phase and the second dressage test forced me to keep his jump saddle on for the test.

When we returned to the stadium entrance, Pilot relaxed a good deal. I hadn’t had time to put his gag back in and was jumping him in his dressage bridle! He’s a forward little horse and the hills were more than an invitation to get luggy. After the first three fences, I DROPPED ABOUT 60 IQ POINTS AND FORGOT WHERE I WAS GOING. Time penalties didn’t figure into scores, but I didn’t want to keep other teams waiting while I got my head out of my fugue state. I looked left and thought, gee, that looks familiar. As I hadn’t given him much time to straighten and balance, he jumped and landed in a very disorganized state – headed downhill to a combination. I was disorganized as well and he stood off from the first fence of the combination. Whoops, I felt myself behind him and slipped the reins. What a mess. Then I thought, no point trying to reel him in for the next four strides before the second fence so I got my cowboy reins and just STAYED WITH THE HORSE. I pointed him up the hill to the next fence, still pretty much reinless and he jumped beautifully. Just before the last fence, I managed to regain my composure and reins and actually had to squeeze my squirty little guy over the last oxer. I left the field laughing like a madwoman.

I decided we would do the October Loch Moy Starter at Beginner Novice. We went to do a cross-country school at Turner Park a week before and just when everything appeared to be going very well, Pilot propped slightly at a (later assessed as Novice) schoolhouse before launching over it. I went off like a Roman candle into the September sky – but not for long -- coming down heavily on my back. I had clearly bitten off more than I could chew and was warned that the fences in Maryland would push the envelope for height and width. That, and my saddle, bought new for the Dutch Warmblood, was not tacky and was not breaking in fast enough. I bought another saddle and dropped my entry to Baby Beginner Novice.

Loch Moy went off without a hitch and though I protested that all I wanted to do was have fun and go safely, I was deeply disappointed with my dressage test (which wasn’t that bad), beat myself up for trotting my little fences in stadium and much of the cross-country course. In other words, I was kicking my own butt because I cared enough to be competitive.

Best of all, though, were the folks from Angelica and Yvonne Lucas and my trailer buddies Laura and Chance who cheered us on as we came back from cross-country, me with a stupid grin on my face and more love in my heart for my horse than I could express in any language. And I thought on the drive home, it’s taken me thirteen years to get here. I must have really wanted it. Now, I could at least say why I’d wanted it – from behind actual, if elementary, experience.