It seemed like fate that eventer Tim Jones would one day own and compete horses named Ironman and Teflon.

The amateur rider has been through a lot in his life, from putting himself through college, dealing with the death of both parents and building a business from scratch, but through it all, Jones has exuded a mental confidence and eternally positive attitude that’s helped him reach his dreams, both in and out of the saddle.

Growing up near Rochester, N.Y., with a single mother who was ill and an estranged father, Jones would sit on the fence of his grandfather’s farm to stare at his “pasture ornaments,” hoping to ride someday.

He didn’t sit on a horse until he was 18 when he came across a trail riding facility. By that point, he was putting himself through school at Keuka College (N.Y.) and earning a degree in occupational therapy.

Upon graduation, Jones landed in Midland, Texas, at an inpatient rehabilitation hospital in 1995 where he promptly spent his first paycheck on riding lessons at a local hunter/jumper barn.

Starting in a western saddle learning the basics like posting the trot, Jones, who had a football background, rode three times a week and showed up other days just to hang out and watch.

“Looking back, they were probably like, who’s this 22-year-old football player dude who is hanging out on his free nights out here?” he said with a laugh.

Tim Jones and Just A Blemish. Photo courtesy of Tim Jones

Jones was transferred to a therapy company in southern Virginia, and he soon found Sandy River Equestrian Center in Axton, Va.

Owner Suzanne Lacy was an eventer and started teaching Jones on her school horses. Jones leased a horse, then eventually bought his own, Gilbert, and trained with Emily Beshear, Mike Plumb and Jimmy Wofford.

He did his first unrecognized event in 1996. “I just kept plugging away. I did my first horse trials in 1997 at the Virginia Horse Trials and fell off in stadium and got eliminated at the very first fence, right over the horse’s head,” he said.

Jones works as a certified hand therapist and is one of only 350 certified driving rehab specialists in the country. Those skills brought him to Frederick, Md., in 2000, and he promptly found the nearest eventing barn to board.

After four years at that job, he opened his own practice. “That really gave me the autonomy to set my hours. At the hospital I was locked into their scheduling. It was hard to get it all done. Owning my own practice allows me to do it all,” he said.

Seven years ago, after a few project horses, Jones came across Ironman and Teflon.

While sharing an office suite with Dr. Susan Brinkley, who turned out to have an interest in eventing, Jones learned she owned a stallion and had some of his offspring for sale.

Tim Jones and Ironman. Photo by GRC Photography.

Ironman, 5 at the time, was sitting in a field virtually untouched. Teflon was a yearling with an interesting back-story, and Jones took them both.

“I showed up with my trailer, and she threw her husband up on I-Man because she’d only had a rider on him once or twice. I watched him go, then looked at Teflon. I wrote her a check for $4,500 and put them on the trailer,” he said.

Teflon had been born in an ice storm.

“When they found him in the morning he was more or less frozen into the earth. The temperature was so low, and with hypothermia setting in they recommended putting him down. They carried him in, and he had such massive frostbite wounds over his hocks and front ankles from being frozen to the ground. They carried him to their basement, and he lived on straw for many weeks, and they would walk the broodmare in for him to nurse,” said Jones. “He had massive open wounds on his hocks that were not healing. They treated those wounds for an entire year, until I bought him, and they had just closed up. He had horrendous blemishes on those hocks and ankles, scars that will never go away, so when I bought him she called him Teflon because they sprayed wound coat stuff that looked like Teflon on him. I named him Just A Blemish.”

Jones admits his life goal was to finish one preliminary, and once he got Ironman going, that seemed almost unreachable. But with help from Wofford, Sharon White and Tim Bourke, the Thoroughbred/Trakehner gelding (The Delegate—Onge’s Tuff Wonder) came along.

“It was a nightmare. He would literally run from your leg and run down and tackle anything. He was a really hard ride. Jimmy [Wofford] used to say, ‘Don’t put your leg on this horse.’ It’s been a challenge for me, but he’s got an unbelievable heart. He would jump through fire for you,” he said.

Tim Jones with a patient. Photo courtesy of Tim Jones.

Teflon, a Selle Français/Thoroughbred gelding also by The Delegate, has been a bit easier and is currently going training level.

“My goal was always to do one prelim, then I said I’m done after that—with raising two kids at home and having a business and working with a lot of spinal cord injuries and quadriplegics, some of them horse related injuries,” he said.

But after a great cross-country round at the Virginia Horse Trials CCI* in 2013 on Ironman, Jones began to see intermediate as a possibility.

“He’s got a heart that is amazing. He will do whatever it takes to get us to the other side,” he said.

The pair completed three intermediate horse trials this fall with no cross-country jumping penalties.

Jones balances life competing two horses with supporting his family’s passions. His wife, Deanna, who’s also an occupational therapist, is an avid runner, and their children, Gavin, 11, and Ella, 13 are interested in many different sports. Ella enjoys eventing as well.

“We’re a really competitive family. The kids are passionate about their sports, [Deanna] does triathlons and marathons. She trains really hard herself, and in these last couple of years with how much this means to me and how hard I work at it, she’s really supportive of it. There’s no way I could do it if she wasn’t part of the team making every night happen with the kids sports and both getting our training in,” he said.

Tim is also an avid Harley Davidson fan, and enjoys taking out the bike that his father, who died two years ago from cancer, left to him.

Tim, who lives in Shepardstown, W.Va., goes to the gym at 4:45 in the morning during the work week, gets back to the house to get the kids on the bus by 6:30, rides two horses, and is seeing his first client by 10 a.m. 

He keeps his horses at home now and is able to ride in the dark with arena lights.

Tim Jones helps his patients, who are often amputees, learn to drive and regain independence. Photo courtesy of Tim Jones.

Tim said that surrounding himself with positive people and thinking positively about his riding has brought him to places beyond what he ever imagined for himself.

“What I realized is you have to get rid of the negative people in your life. Surround yourself with positive people. Sharon told me with every thing you pick apart about your riding, think of something positive. All of a sudden I started doing well when I said, ‘Yeah I can do this.’ Every time I jump a fence with her, last year she said, ‘Tim, tell me three things you did well before you tell me one thing you’d want to improve.’ That totally changed my way of riding,” he said.

Working with patients who are suffering from terminal illnesses or severe disabilities also helps put things in perspective for him.

“Every person I work with has had a catastrophic injury or disability they never planned on. Because there are very few of us that have the technology or the high tech training, which is electronic driving controls, joystick driving systems—these are for the severest disabilities—I have people that will come three states away and will stay in a hotel and work with me all week. They invest in me, in hopes I can make them independent someday,” he said.

“Every day the role I’m playing with these people is giving them back some independence. That can be a really depressing job—you’re dealing one-to-one with people who’ve lost everything. The horses sort of build me back up.

“If I were to sit and think about all the tragedy I see everyday, you’d want to be in a bar every night, but instead, the horses are sort of my outlet. Working out in the gym every morning and getting my rides in sort of gets me through each day to say, ‘Yeah we can do this.’ Look at these people who I work with who have no arms and legs, that have been in Afghanistan and stepped on an IED and lost all four limbs. If I can teach them to use their teeth to put a chest strap on and get out of their wheelchair or use their wheel chair to integrate with technology and become independent on a lift, I think I can go ride a horse and get up when it’s 27 degrees out.”

Tim described himself as determined and serious as a college student because he worked two jobs to foot the bill, and as he entered fatherhood and his career, he kept to those standards by laying out what he wanted to accomplish in his life.

“I put a [list] on my door that said ‘Life Goals.’ It literally said under it, ‘A house in the country, a wife and children, a Harley Davidson and two horses in the backyard.’ That stayed on my door for two years. That was a mission statement for me to get it done and keep working,” he said.