MONROE — Some of the best times are when Jackie Gudmundson goes to the barn each day. Hearing her voice, the horses whinny in greeting and come to her, eager for a loving word and a gentle touch.
“When I walk into the barn, they’re excited to see me,” she said. “And it’s unconditional.”
Try getting that from a soccer ball.
Lots of people love their sport, but Gudmundson’s sport allows her to experience another love, that of horses. The 30-year-old Monroe woman competes in professional women’s rodeo, so in a sense her horses are her teammates. But at other times the relationship is more like a mother and children.
“They probably get to see my softer side more than others,” she said with a smile. “I love on them and hug them and pet them. But their personalities are all so different, some of them soak that up and others could care less.”
Gudmundson has spent all but her first few years around horses. She grew up in the tiny Eastern Washington town of Nespelem, about 20 miles north of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Colville Indian Reservation. A community, she said, “where everybody has a horse in their backyard.”
She was given a horse for her fourth birthday. A year later she was entering junior rodeo events. Two years after that she was competing for cash prizes.
“Where I came from, everybody rodeo-ed,” she said. “That’s what my friends did and that’s what everybody did. Everybody went to the rodeo.”
At Lake Roosevelt High School, Gudmundson — back then, she was known by her birth name of Jackie Jackson — also ran cross country and played basketball. But rodeo was her passion, and she was good enough to win a scholarship to Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho, where she graduated in 2000 with a degree in psychology.
She then worked and competed for a few years before meeting her future husband, Murray Gudmundson Jr., who graduated from Sultan High School in 1988. They were married last June and now make their home in Monroe, where they operate a residential excavation company. In addition to training and caring for horses, she does office work and drives a dump truck.
And she still competes.
Gudmundson expects to enter 50-60 events this year, meaning she is gone for many weekends. Often there are multiple rodeos on one weekend. Over this year’s three-day July 4th weekend, for instance, Gudmundson expects to be at rodeos in St. Paul, Ore., Molalla, Ore., Eugene, Ore., Vancouver, Wash., Toppenish and Sedro-Woolley.
In a given year, her pickup and horse trailer will log roughly 50,000 miles.
“It is chaotic,” she said, “but it’s what I do. It’s all I know. I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t do it.”
Gudmundson competes in barrel racing, which is the sole event in women’s pro rodeo. It is a timed event, with riders racing their horses from a start-finish line in a looping pattern around three barrels arranged in a triangular formation before returning to the line. Races typically last from 15-17 seconds.
For the past several years she has ridden a mare named Babs, but that horse is aging, so she is breaking in another mare named Bob “that I have high hopes for.” She is also rearing other horses, “and when the next great one comes along,” she said, “I plan to go hard (in training and competing) and try to make it to the national finals.”
Gudmundson rode Bud during a recent rodeo in Monroe, clocking a time of under 17 seconds.
The best part of rodeo, she said, is “the competition and the camaraderie. My best friends came out of rodeo. The three people who stood up for me at my wedding are all rodeo-based, and all from different parts of the country. So there’s a huge friendship there. But the competition, and being able to take an animal and develop a bond with it and teach it to do something, and then to compete and be successful at it, that’s very rewarding.”
It’s also profitable, though hardly on a par with other pro athletes. Gudmundson has earned around $50,000 in a year, but had other years of less than $10,000.
“They don’t guarantee you a paycheck,” she said. “It all depends on your performance, so it’s a very humbling lifestyle. You can be on the top of the world one day, and the next day (you win) nothing.”
Her expenses, meanwhile, are steady and substantial — among other things, there are costs for vehicle maintenance, fuel, hay, dietary supplements, and veterinary care — so she generally spends more than she earns.
“To be honest with you,” she said, “I don’t know that I’ve ever sat down and come up with a dollar figure (for expenses), because that might be discouraging.”
In women’s rodeo, “there’s a very small percentage of people who make money. And at the level where I am right now, I’m not making money. But when I had one horse, and it was just me with my pickup and my horse trailer running up and down the road, I could make a little bit of money. But (not) now that I have 20 head of horses, a barn, a house and all these things.”
Indeed, there have been sacrifices along the way. Gudmundson and her husband “don’t go to Hawaii. We go to rodeos, horse shows and that sort of thing. But when I think about all the great things that have happened in my life, they’ve all been because of (rodeo).
“As a kid it gave me a work ethic,” she said. “It gave me a college education. It gave me an opportunity to travel the country. I met my husband because of it. It made me who I am, so I guess you can’t out a price tag on that. And it’s all been because of horses and the lifestyle.”
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