The goal of every race is to make it to the finish line first. We've been lucky enough to have our share of first place finishers over the years and hopefully there are more still in the cards. What they won't be, however, is chronicled in this space.
I tried to keep rolling the last couple of years but the pressures of work, the partnerships, the Canterbury Club and now the Midwest Paddock Report, Fat Guys' Rants and some freelance writing have strained my time resources to the breaking point.
The final straw for me was when I logged in here for the first time in a long while and saw that I had several unfinished posts laying about. They seemed like great ideas at the time but I whiffed on them and I decided it was time to pack this in. There are only so many hours in the day and maintaining a blog that I can only get to every few months...well, I just can't do that.
The timing is pretty good.
It's the end of another year and as it winds down, Owning Racehorses will wind down with it. Over the next week or two I will post a few of my favorites and some of the more popular posts over past eight years that I've been keeping this...online journal, I guess you could call it. I hope you enjoy them the second time around.
I'd like to thank you all for visiting this space from time to time and reading what I wrote. I've been fortunate to have been shared a time or two by Equidaily, the Paulick Report and the Blood-Horse. The blog also helped give me the opportunity to freelance for a few years for the Daily Racing Form covering Canterbury Park.
Special thanks go to David Miller, Jim Dunleavy, Jeff Maday, the folks over at Hello Race Fans, TURF and the Thoroughbred Bloggers Alliance for helping me get started and gain an audience.
This isn't the end of the turf writing for me, though. Far from it. I will be able to commit more energy to the Midwest Paddock Report where I am fortunate enough to work with the love of my life, equine photog extraordinaire Heather Frisbie (the future Mrs. Grevelis, in case you hadn't heard), on a labor of love that we're working hard to transform into something more.
I've also teamed with my longtime best friend, Chris Palladino, on Fat Guys' Rants, a collection of our rantings on just about anything. That will be followed sometime after the first of the year with a companion podcast that will be available on iTunes. There probably won't be a lot of racing on there, but I'll work it in when I can!
I hope you'll join me over at the Midwest Paddock Report and Fat Guys Rants. I'll still be on Twitter at @tlgrevelis as well as @mwpaddockreport and @FatRantsTed and the Report also has its own Facebook page.
A lot has happened over the past eight years and I appreciate you all sharing it with me. Enjoy the "best of" over the next few weeks and I'll see you at the races!
Showing posts with label Midwest Paddock Report. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Midwest Paddock Report. Show all posts
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Midwest Paddock Report
I had teased a few posts back about a new venture we were working on and now we're ready to unveil it.
The Midwest Paddock Report is a combined effort of my photographer better half, Heather Frisbie, and I to bring a spotlight on racing here in the Heartland. I can't guarantee a lot of things in life, but one thing I can guarantee is that we will have growing pains. As painstaking as it was for two non-techies to build this site, I can absolutely guarantee that once we get rolling we're going to find all kinds of things we wished we would have done differently.
Ideally we would launch with comprehensive coverage of the entire Midwest from Ohio to the Dakotas and down to Oklahoma. Ideally. However since we are a two-person operation working on a limited (read: "no") budget, we are starting with a still ambitious, but much more doable, agenda of covering Minnesota and Iowa.
While our focus in owning and breeding has been in Thoroughbreds, we are going to try and include our Standardbred cousins as well. I don't know if that's going work but we'll see. My roots in harness racing go back to college and trips to now defunct Lewiston Raceway in Maine which was my first continuous exposure to live horse racing (after an amazing Preakness experience in 1985) with college classmate and lifelong friend Paul Mooney. I really enjoyed harness racing, have owned small pieces of pacers in the past and have included Scarborough, Dover and Pocono Downs, the Meadowlands and Pompano Park in my travels over the decades. Admittedly the popularity isn't the same as Thoroughbreds and if the interest isn't there we will pare back to "the Flats", but we're going to give it a go. Where we have dual meets going we will also cover the major stories in regional Quarter Horse racing with the same caveat.
We have a section that we call "Around the Region" where we will preview and recap stakes races around the Midwest and performances that should be highlighted. We're hoping to rely on readers to pass along story ideas and horses to watch to help us bring those stories to the people.
Speaking of people, we will be spotlighting folks in racing from time to time in our "In the Paddock" section. We'll take movers, shakers and all around interesting people and ask them 5 questions. A quick look at what they do and how they affect the game.
We'll also touch base on the bigger picture in our "National Scene" section. Admittedly I'm not altogether sure how we're going to do that and it's really not going to be our focus, but it's important to give some regional perspective to the Triple Crown Trail and the Breeders' Cup.
Currently we're relatively advertising free with the exception of a couple of spots for Google AdSense, but that will change - mostly as I get adept at creating advertising and working with the widgets to be able to place the ads where I want to so they look good and deliver value without detracting from the site. While we may be a labor of love right now, we don't intend on it being that way forever so feel free to inquire since this will get some priority in our development queue.
We're going to be looking to inject personality into our coverage. We'd like to be a place where you come for your Midwest racing news as if you'd be sitting down with coffee with your neighbor and discussing the last night's race. We'd like to entertain as well as inform and generate discussion.
Before I wrap, I'd like to thank family and friends that have reviewed and critiqued the birth process. You've all be indispensable. Truly indispensable was Frank Vespe, founder of the wonderful Mid-Atlantic on-line magazine, The Racing Biz, who provided us with advice and continues to be an inspiration.
We invite you take a look and let us know what you think. While you're there, follow the Midwest Paddock Report on Twitter and you'll soon be able to "like" our Facebook page as well. We look forward to hearing from you!
The Midwest Paddock Report is a combined effort of my photographer better half, Heather Frisbie, and I to bring a spotlight on racing here in the Heartland. I can't guarantee a lot of things in life, but one thing I can guarantee is that we will have growing pains. As painstaking as it was for two non-techies to build this site, I can absolutely guarantee that once we get rolling we're going to find all kinds of things we wished we would have done differently.
Ideally we would launch with comprehensive coverage of the entire Midwest from Ohio to the Dakotas and down to Oklahoma. Ideally. However since we are a two-person operation working on a limited (read: "no") budget, we are starting with a still ambitious, but much more doable, agenda of covering Minnesota and Iowa.
While our focus in owning and breeding has been in Thoroughbreds, we are going to try and include our Standardbred cousins as well. I don't know if that's going work but we'll see. My roots in harness racing go back to college and trips to now defunct Lewiston Raceway in Maine which was my first continuous exposure to live horse racing (after an amazing Preakness experience in 1985) with college classmate and lifelong friend Paul Mooney. I really enjoyed harness racing, have owned small pieces of pacers in the past and have included Scarborough, Dover and Pocono Downs, the Meadowlands and Pompano Park in my travels over the decades. Admittedly the popularity isn't the same as Thoroughbreds and if the interest isn't there we will pare back to "the Flats", but we're going to give it a go. Where we have dual meets going we will also cover the major stories in regional Quarter Horse racing with the same caveat.
We have a section that we call "Around the Region" where we will preview and recap stakes races around the Midwest and performances that should be highlighted. We're hoping to rely on readers to pass along story ideas and horses to watch to help us bring those stories to the people.
Speaking of people, we will be spotlighting folks in racing from time to time in our "In the Paddock" section. We'll take movers, shakers and all around interesting people and ask them 5 questions. A quick look at what they do and how they affect the game.
We'll also touch base on the bigger picture in our "National Scene" section. Admittedly I'm not altogether sure how we're going to do that and it's really not going to be our focus, but it's important to give some regional perspective to the Triple Crown Trail and the Breeders' Cup.
Currently we're relatively advertising free with the exception of a couple of spots for Google AdSense, but that will change - mostly as I get adept at creating advertising and working with the widgets to be able to place the ads where I want to so they look good and deliver value without detracting from the site. While we may be a labor of love right now, we don't intend on it being that way forever so feel free to inquire since this will get some priority in our development queue.
We're going to be looking to inject personality into our coverage. We'd like to be a place where you come for your Midwest racing news as if you'd be sitting down with coffee with your neighbor and discussing the last night's race. We'd like to entertain as well as inform and generate discussion.
Before I wrap, I'd like to thank family and friends that have reviewed and critiqued the birth process. You've all be indispensable. Truly indispensable was Frank Vespe, founder of the wonderful Mid-Atlantic on-line magazine, The Racing Biz, who provided us with advice and continues to be an inspiration.
We invite you take a look and let us know what you think. While you're there, follow the Midwest Paddock Report on Twitter and you'll soon be able to "like" our Facebook page as well. We look forward to hearing from you!
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