An Unwanted Vacation

Winter set in with a vengeance, and the track at Victory Haven looked more like a skating rink than a training facility. UB’s explosive cough was likely an effect of the Polycrap but it needed attention, so rather than risk the well being of the horses, we convinced Joe to let us give everyone a break on the farm. It would, we pointed out, also give his bank account a bit of a break. He didn’t agree, because as he pointed out, horses can’t make any money standing on the farm. Finally Joe relented, albeit grudgingly.

We assumed that UB would enjoy being afforded a little R&R, and reconnecting with a couple of his old buddies—namely Digging Deep and J. Hamilton.

While Digger was happier than a pig in slop (and usually resembled one) The Hamster had a distinctively different take on farm life. Especially farm life in the dead of winter. The Princess, as my friend Jeanne had dubbed Ham, quickly convinced UB that farm life was the pits.

Heaven forbid it began to get dark and we were still readying the barn! Together Ham and UB would stand at the gate of their paddock and neigh frantically—it was really more like screaming—until we humanoids could stand it no longer and relented, bringing them in—ready or not.

March was approaching and decent weather days began to outnumber the bad, so back to the track we went, and not a moment too soon for The Unbelievable. He certainly hadn’t lost much in the way of fitness, as pacing back and forth along the fenceline kept his muscles taut.

By the time UB was ready for his next race, Turfway Park was winding down the winter meet. Jerry decided to drop UB back down in class to the level where he had run 3rd--for a couple of reasons. One was to make it as easy as possible on UB coming back from his layoff. The second reason was in hopes of having some money flow back into Joe’s bank account.

Victor Lebron’s stock was rising in the racing world, and at entry time he was in high demand, so our hopes of having him as UB’s pilot for a second race were dashed. Another young rider, Orlando Mojica, was purported to be talented and was available. But the question remained to be answered—could he and UB traverse the track as one?

DAILY NOTES: A couple more important truths from 21 Reasons…

2. God has given us plenty of explanation if we will only look for it and accept it.

The Bible gives many principles and examples to point us toward potentially productive reasons bad things happen to good people. The stories of Christians who have battled severe suffering show that God is able to produce much good from the bad we encounter.

And

3. God can do more than one good thing through the bad things that happen to us.

I’m going to use myself as an example to the above. With each passing blow to my sanity in 2010, I went to the Bible and found that so much worse had happened to so many others, and they had come out the other side better than before. And, when I could look past my self-pity, I had to acknowledge that indeed, if it didn’t kill me, it had to be making me stronger, right? It was certainly making me wiser and more dependent on God than on myself. Ah ha! Something good from something bad!

Slowly Making Progress

We were feeling quite encouraged by both UB’s good gate behavior and his third place finish, even though the company he kept in that race was of a lesser caliber. He needed that race to regain his fitness and he seemed to handle the Poly OK, so four weeks later, we looked to Turfway Park again—this time upping the competition level by entering in a maiden special weight event.

But, alas, a problem arose. Edgar Paucar, the only jockey to date that UB seem inclined to allow to remain on his back for an entire race had been injured in a spill. Mr. Paucar was sidelined for an indeterminate amount of time with a badly broken leg, so we were forced to look elsewhere for a rider.

Enter Victor Lebron, at that time a neophyte rider new to Kentucky. Being the new jock on the block generally means you can’t be too picky about your mounts, and luckily for us, he wasn’t. As UB’s reputation seemed to travel ahead of him wherever we went, we assumed Victor was either that hungry for mounts or that much of a blockhead. It was the former.

Victor stayed in the irons, and UB, who didn’t have the best of trips, found himself carried 4 wide coming out of the turn and scrambling to make up ground. Although he finished 6th, UB ran a decent race considering the serious step up in company, and Victor made all the right post-race jockey noises thanking us for the opportunity and saying that he liked the horse.

UB, for his part, stretched his neck straight out and coughed explosively.

“Uh Oh,” said I.

DAILY NOTES: Dave Earley, in the introduction to 21 Reasons Bad Things Happen to Good People, states that his book is a ‘biblical study of potential benefits that come into our lives through suffering.’ Earley frames the discussion by first reminding us of four important truths.

1. God is under no obligation to give us an explanation for suffering. We don’t want to hear it, but it’s true. God is under no obligation to answer our questions. In this life, we may never see or fully understand why many things happen. That’s what faith is about. It is trusting God in the midst of, trusting God in spite of, trusting God not only when we can see, but also when we cannot see.

Earley goes on to say that a god that he can completely comprehend is no God at all. He is glad that the God he worships, the God he serves and the God he trusts in the midst of suffering, pain and evil is bigger than he can totally understand. God is bigger than we can figure out, and therefore big enough to see us through.

When Last We Left UB

When last we left UB (which seems a very long time ago!) he had just finished 3rd in his first start for trainer Jerry Wylie. If you’ll remember, just making it into and then out of the starting gate with all four feet on the ground was a tremendous amount of progress. Finishing “in the money” was icing on the cake.

UB’s third at Turfway was racing on a synthetic surface, which had quickly become all the rage in the racing world. At this point in time, fraught with bad press raining down due to tragedies like the breakdowns suffered by Barbaro and Eight Belles, Thoroughbred racing was seeking to improve its image. And fast.

As is so common in our industry, the sport was all about the quick fix. Many tracks jumped on the bandwagon, trading in their old dirt racing surfaces for the “poly,” touted by it’s creators to greatly increase safety and vastly reduce catastrophic breakdowns.

Turfway was the first Kentucky track to switch to this surface, produced under such names as Polytrack and Tapeta. This type of racing surface was composed of ground up rubber and carpet fibers and was supposed to allow moisture to drain right through, so that horses would no longer ever race on a “sloppy” track.

The California racing commission even went so far as to mandate all of their tracks to switch to synthetic surfaces—a move that forced the closure of tracks that could not afford to do so.

But what happened, as racing commenced on the “Poly-crap,” as many horsemen began to refer to it, is that a different kind of injury became common. Soft tissue injuries like bowed tendons and blown suspensories were seen more and more. Horses hacked and coughed and snorted and blew as they cooled out after races and sometimes for days after due to the airborne carpet fibers they sucked into their lungs as they raced.

And horsemen were told that if they had “grass” horses that preferred running on turf instead of dirt the Poly was the kind of track for them. Well, not exactly, as it seems that the Poly was an entirely new experience—a third entity—and yet another surface that a horse might possibly love or possibly hate.

UB was lukewarm about it, but as we were about to find out, when it came to racing it was always UB’s way or the highway.

DAILY NOTES: I got used to waking in the morning with a WWF-like announcer’s voice in my head screaming “In this corner, we have the darkest force walking the Earth…the Prince of Darkness…aka Satan. In that corner, appearing shaky and scared and trying not to embarrass Christ by calling herself a Christian and then doing something un-Christian-like…Shon Wylie! LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLE!!!

Some days the best I could to as far as prayer went was to beg “Please, God, just don’t leave me.” I would also pray for my temper not to get the best of me, which happens a lot. But as I began to read 21 Reasons Bad Things Happen to Good People, I realized that I might finally be able to point my friend toward an answer to her question. And draw the strength I needed to get through each day.

Dave Earley’s book begins:

Why do bad things happen to good people? It’s a question we all ask. Every day in the newspaper we read the tragic tales of suffering, pain, and evils on planet Earth. Horribly bad things happen to very good people. Men with large families and women who are single moms lose their jobs. People get cancer. There are devastating floods and fires, hurricanes and tornadoes. Babies die or are born with crippling diseases. People are robbed, mugged, raped, abused and murdered. In some parts of the world, Christians are tortured for their faith.

Seeing it all laid out like that in print made me see just how preposterous it must seem to some that a loving, all-powerful God exists.