A typical day for Kirsten Buffamoyer might include riding her three horses, working on her fledgling sport horse classifieds website, managing the boarding facility she runs, raising reining horses and helping out her husband, David, with his Premier Equine Insurance business, but she somehow manages to find the time to campaign her Thoroughbred Jim at the two-star level.

“I have a few irons in the fire!” she said with a laugh. “Sometimes it’s late nights and early mornings and trying to fit things in where I can. I don’t have a set schedule, luckily. I’m able to be flexible with my horse shows and have a little bit of wiggle room and freedom that way.”

Kirsten, 41, recently achieved her longtime goal of completing a CCI** at the Jersey Fresh International (N.J.) with Jim, a 12-year-old gelding (Delaware Township—Miss Gumbo, Private Terms). They jumped clear on cross-country, adding only time penalties and one rail to their score.

Kirsten grew up in Spokane, Wash., and evented through intermediate before heading to Gonzaga University (Wash.) to study biology. She rode throughout college and kept a small farm with her mother where they got horses off the track to retrain and sell.

“I have a soft spot for the Thoroughbreds,” she said. “I enjoy buying them and finding little gems and retraining them and selling them.”

After graduation, Kirsten was a working student for a year with Louise Merryman in New York and ended up in South Carolina working for Tiffani Loudon.

“Life kind of takes you in interesting directions,” she said. “I lived in South Carolina for almost a year and had a horse trying to get to a two-star. I still had not made it to a two-star and he did a tendon injury two weeks out from the Camino Real CCI** in Texas. It was a pretty bad tendon injury so I retired him after that.”

During that period, Kirsten moved to Colorado “for a boy” and eventing took a back burner when she realized he’d need to be retired.

She started helping his family’s Quarter Horse ranch prepare horses for a yearly production sale. It was there that she took an interest in reining. After that relationship ended, she found herself back in South Carolina.

 “I did learn a lot about training horses and general horsemanship through the reining,” she said. “They’re very broke in their bodies and you have such a limited amount of time to get them broke to be futurity horses, so you really focus on what you need to do to get that horse to a certain point every day. I learned a lot of the discipline of training horses through that—lead changes and getting them to give their shoulder and their mouth and their hips. It was really an interesting learning curve to go through. A lot of it, I was able to apply to the event horses, for sure.”

While riding as an amateur on the South Carolina reining circuit, Kirsten won several national titles and was South Carolina state champion in 2005. Around the same time, she met her husband, David, a former baseball player for the New York Yankees in the 1980s, who is a reiner and runs his own equine insurance business.

The couple started breeding, raising and training reining horses, but Kirsten was lured back into the eventing world and began to focus almost exclusively on it about six years ago.

“It’s a lot of fun but finally I made a commitment to go with the event horses while I was still young enough and brave enough,” she said. “I felt like I could always return to reining for fun if I wanted to. It was hard to switch back and forth and very expensive too!”

Kirsten campaigned Life Is Good, a Thoroughbred/Paint gelding (Dam Straight—Bingo Bev, Unmistaken) through intermediate before she came across Jim as a 6-year-old.

The gelding hadn’t been ridden in three years, but was well bred and had sold for $250,000 at the Keeneland Sale (Ky.). He’d run well and had a few big name jockeys ride him, but his career “fizzled out” and he was given away to sit in a field.

“He was quite the find,” said Kirsten. “I had Life Is Good at the time and he turned out to be a little bit too careful at the upper levels. I found Jim in a pasture, not far from where I live. I had gone to look at another horse I’d heard about who turned out to be extremely ugly. I was trying to figure out a way to exit the situation gracefully and Jim trotted up and looked kind of interesting.

Kirsten hopped on the gelding and he cantered off on a loose rein, so she took him home.

“I’ve been quietly taking my time with him,” she said. “He stepped on a nail about a year after I had him and it almost punctured the joint capsule, so he had almost a year off. Otherwise, he’s really a special horse. The only issues I’ve ever had with him have been my inability to get his nose between the flags and show him the questions!”

Kirsten gets help occasionally from Beth Perkins and Peter Atkins when she’s at home in Anderson, S.C.

“He has a penchant for over-jumping,” she said of the chestnut. “Sometimes, clearing the tops of the standards. When I moved him up to preliminary, I wanted to make sure it was sorted out—I’d never had one that had that type of issue. Peter helped me with that. He rode him for three or four months and took him to one or two events. Once in awhile, when I hit an awkward distance, I know I’d better hang on! He hates to get close to the jump.”

She and Jim placed third in the CIC* at Poplar Place (Ga.) this spring and now that they’ve completed their first CCI**, Kirsten will go with whatever comes next, including moving up to advanced.

“As long as it’s taken me to get here, I’m very realistic with these horses,” she said. “Anything can happen, so it’s always a little bit guarded. You hate to put all of your eggs in one basket. If it happens, that would be very cool.”

When she’s not busy with Jim, Kirsten has two other off-the-track Thoroughbreds, one at prelim and one getting ready for his first event. She also manages her boarding facility with 12 horses of hers and David’s and seven boarders, helps David with advertising and marketing for Premier and is in the process of starting up her own sport horse classified website, Sport Horse City.

“There’s never a typical day,” she said with a laugh.