With only a little over three months left until the Thoroughbred Makeover, Dom and I are on a cycle of ride/train, eat, sleep, work, repeat. We continue our dressage lessons, work on the canter, try to get more of a right bend in every gait, and do more sitting trot work. But there are only so many times I can go around in a circle, cross a diagonal, make a serpentine, or go down the center or quarter line before we get antsy and are ready for something new!

Michael Blowen glanced at the 1977 Sports Illustrated cover of Triple Crown champion Seattle Slew when it arrived in the mail and immediately discarded it. A horse on the cover of such a prominent magazine?

“I thought thinking of them as athletes was absurd,” he said.

Blowen, then a writer for the Boston Globe, accompanied Bob Taylor, one of his editors, to Suffolk Downs seven years later. The visit to the Massachusetts track was life-changing.