The blank page
He came off the track with almost no history. I've spent every month since writing one for him.
Harvey arrived sound enough, sweet enough, and with almost nothing else. A registration paper, a rumor about an old injury, and the kind of history you assemble from secondhand sentences. No medical record worth the name. No training log. No one could tell me when he'd last had his teeth done, or whether the lump on his leg was old or new, or what he'd been like to shoe.
Off the track is not a personality. It's a starting line. Harvey is curious, opinionated about rain, braver than he was in spring, and still figuring out how to be a horse instead of an athlete. Learning him has been the most rewarding slow work I've ever done — and the reason this journal exists.
From the day he came home, I started his record. The intake vet visit. The dental. The first farrier cycle to begin undoing racing feet. His weight, his condition, the date I first noticed every small thing. A year on, Harvey has something he didn't have when he arrived: a history. It's not impressive. It's just kept — and it's already changed how well I can care for him.
A horse with a record never has to start from zero again. Harvey started from zero once. I'm making sure he never does again.
This is where you'll follow Harvey's first year and everything after — the progress and the setbacks, the vet scare and the relief, the ordinary Tuesdays and the breakthroughs. I tell it as it happens, not in tidy hindsight. Some weeks the update is a victory. Some weeks it's a recheck on Thursday and a held breath. Come find out how it goes.
If Harvey is the blank page, Marshall — 21 this month, mine since he was two months old — is the full book. One horse I'm learning from scratch; one I know by heart. Between them is everything I believe about keeping a horse well.
Harvey's Journal
The ongoing arc of one off-track Thoroughbred — in the letter every other Sunday, the moment it happens.