Flying Change: A Year of Racing and Family and Steeplechasing by Patrick Smithwick, Chesapeake Book Company, 2012, 360 pages, $30.00If you can avoid disabling injury, horseback riding is a sport that many enjoy for a lifetime. All of us have heard anecdotal tales of people who ride—and even foxhunt—up into their seventies and eighties.

With Baby Boomers aging, those stories will become more prevalent, although many of us may be opting for the dressage arena instead of the hunt meet...or the race track.

Author Patrick Smithwick decided to meet growing older head on. He challenged himself at age forty-six to ride in the Maryland Hunt Cup, a four-mile timber race over twenty-two solidly built fences that are not for the faint of heart. It is the world’s stiffest timber race.