Amateur jumper rider Amy Shafmaster spends most of her time juggling her schedule around riding five show horses, competing in the high amateur jumpers and running her family business. And even for a woman charged with regularly making sure countless pounds of lobster make it from the waters off New Hampshire to the dinner tables of China within a few days, the logistics of riding, working and motherhood can be daunting at times.

“Riding helps keep me young,” said the 52-year-old. “Until I can’t do it, I’m going to keep trying.” 

She certainly is doing it for now: Last month, Shafmaster won the $25,000 Saratoga Grand Prix on her own Infante SK at the Saratoga Classic Horse Show (New York).

“I love Saratoga; I’ve shown there since I was 10 years old,” she said. “I haven’t been in a while though, and I just decided I was going [this year].” 

A typical day for Shafmaster involves working at the Newington, New Hampshire, office of her Little Bay Lobster Company from 7 a.m. until 2 p.m. and then heading to her farm, located just over the state line in Eliot, Maine, to ride. By the time she finishes riding, her 12-year-old son, Eli Shafmaster, is ready to be picked up from his after-school activities. On the weekends, Amy either plans her riding around Eli’s extra-curricular schedule or she’s off to another horse show. 

“For me, my son is always my priority,” she said. “If something unexpected happens with him, I always cancel and put him first.” 

Amy grew up in Rye, New Hampshire, and was interested in horses from a young age. No one else in her family rode, but her mom took Amy for lessons at a local barn when she was 4 years old, and the youngster soon dedicated herself to the sport. Throughout her junior years, Amy rode with Mark Jungherr and Carol Thompson, competing successfully in the junior hunters and 3’6” equitation. She moved to the jumpers in her 20s, competing in the amateur-owner jumper ranks and grand prix classes up and down the East Coast.  

After graduating college in 1994, Amy started working for her father’s business, Little Bay Lobster Company, which she said is the largest single harvester of lobster worldwide.

“I worked my way up from the bottom—I’ve done every job here at one point or another,” she said. Nowadays, she runs and manages the company on her own. “We have around 100 employees, and it’s a very male-dominated industry. In the beginning, it was hard [as a woman] to be doing this, but now everyone is used to me and respects me.” 

Little Bay’s fleet of 15 lobster boats fishes an 180,000-square-mile area off the New Hampshire coast, shipping millions of pounds of lobster around the globe. It’s a business with strange similarities to horses, she noted.

“It is very comparable to flying horses internationally,” she said. “We need to have health paperwork completed for the lobsters, they go through TSA screenings, you hope and pray the flights aren’t delayed and that everything goes smoothly through customs in each country.”  

In her early 30s, Amy took a step back from showing horses and stopped riding to focus on the family business. During that period, she also had her son, Eli, and raised him as a single mom. 

“Especially when Eli was younger, it was tough,” she said. “I wanted to be around for him as a young child—I didn’t want to be travelling from horse show to horse show then. I wanted to focus on him first.” 

But at age 47, the horses beckoned to Amy, and she returned to riding.  

“Once the business stabilized and my son was a little older, my goal was to get a horse and keep it at a local barn [in New Hampshire] and not show,” she said. “Now I have seven horses, two barns, and I’m showing again. But for those 15 years that I wasn’t riding, I missed it—my life felt a little empty. I think [having the horses again] makes me a better mom; I’m happier and more engaged because I have something that I’m working towards for myself.”  

Amy’s current string of competition horses includes Carlos, a 17-year-old Dutch Warmblood gelding (Carthino Z—Winde Kind) whom she now saves for special classes; and three horses she rides in the amateur jumpers and grand prix: Infante SK, an 11-year-old Dutch Warmblood gelding sired by Cannabis Z; Celebron T, a 13-year old gelding of unrecorded breeding; and Umbrella Ter Wilgen Z, a 15-year-old Zangersheide mare (Udarco Van Overis—Grimaldi Van’t Paradijs). She also has a 7-year-old mare that her trainer, grand prix rider David Jennings, primarily shows while she gains mileage. 

“When I started back five years ago, I didn’t know I would get back to this level again,” she said. “In my younger years, I was doing bigger grand prix [classes]. At this point in life, I was just hoping to do the low/medium amateur jumpers again, and it’s just kind of progressed from there.”

During the winter, Amy flies between New Hampshire and her farm in Ocala, Florida, to compete at HITS Ocala and the World Equestrian Center—Ocala. She usually shows for two weeks and then takes a week off. When Amy is not there to ride, both Jennings and Brooks Hull, Amy’s exercise rider, keep her horses going. Work usually cooperates with that schedule, as the busiest time of year for Little Bay is between July and October, while the business’s slowest time is January through March.

“It makes it easy for me for Florida,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to compete in Florida if it wasn’t like that. During the summer, I try to go to shows that are within five hours driving time of Rye—like HITS Saugerties, Vermont, the Hampton Classic—so I’m still close to home if something happens. I’ll leave on Thursday nights and come home on Sunday nights and work remotely when I’m not riding or showing.”

After the winter circuit, Amy takes brings her horses home to Maine for some downtime before the summer season in the Northeast. 

“I have a great guy that works for me in my barn, and he’s really reliable and trustworthy,” she said. “He takes a lot of stress away from me, because I’m only able to be at the barn a few hours a day. He has it all under control, and that helps keep my days running smoothly.”  

She stressed that one of the keys to being a successful amateur rider is having a great support system. 

“Stick with it—there are days you’re going to feel really overwhelmed,” she said. “You have to have good people around you: a good trainer, a good babysitter, good people at the barn, etc. You will need support to help balance everything, and you have to find a balance that works for you and your life. 

“There are days I would love to ride for longer after work, but life is what it is sometimes,” she continued. “There are some days that I feel like I could do more, or that I’m not doing everything I could or to the best of my ability. But I try not to worry about it too much, because it’s out of my control. I’m just riding for fun now, and if I get too stressed out, then it’s not fun anymore.”