Islander Brooke Bayley pushes herself. Whether it’s school work, volunteering or eventing at horse shows, she strives to hit the next level.

Bayley got her first taste of riding when she was 10 and joined the Mercer Island Saddle Club. For years she dreamed of becoming a jockey, speeding down a track on the back of a thoroughbred. However, Bayley quickly became too tall for a future as a jockey, who tend to be around 5 foot 3 inches.

Instead, after seeing eventing on TV, Bayley became intrigued with the multi-phase sport and took it up.

“I saw it on TV, and they are just galloping and jumping high things. I said, that’s what I wanted to do. I found a horse that was at the Saddle Club that had done this before, and the person who owned it had trained with an Olympian,” said Bayley.

Since then, Bayley has found another horse and has moved up levels into the higher jumps and stiffer competition.

The three-day eventing that Bayley competes in consists of dressage, which is like obedience trials for the horse and rider; cross country, consisting of running through various obstacle courses; and stadium, or show, jumping.

“In cross country, the horse never sees the course until they run it, and every course is different,” said Bayley’s mother, Joan Bayley. “You have to walk the course three or four times to memorize it and figure out your striding, and then the horse goes through it without knowing the jumps. The partnerships take years and years to build.”

Bayley, who travels anywhere from Montana to Oregon, and this year added California to her show circuit, keeps her horses, Kona and Savoy, in Fall City.

“I go out there every day,” said Bayley. Joan Bayley said for a while they kept the horses at the Saddle Club on the Island, but that simply wasn’t enough space for the thoroughbreds.

“They need to run and have fields,” she said. Bayley said she practices whenever she can, but that it usually ends up being around three to four hours a day, seven days a week.

“With dressage, once you become good at it, it’s really fun. You get this special connection and you literally think the moves, and they just do it,” she said of her favorite part of the competition. “You school to that point, and once you have a good movement, there’s such a good connection between you and the horse. I love that feeling.”

Cross country provides the adrenaline piece for the three days, which Bayley said is the portion she always gets the most pumped up for.

“Brooke’s always been an adrenaline junkie,” her mom said. “She was up skiing at like age 1 and was on the Crystal Mountain team for three years, where she needed to be training four to five days a week, and she was also riding. She had concussions and bumps and bruises all over her, and I just said, you have to give one of these sports your all. She chose eventing.”

Now Bayley devotes a large portion of her time to the sport, on top of taking Advanced Placement and Honors classes at Mercer Island High School and spending a couple of hours each week volunteering at the Little Bit Therapeutic Riding School.

At present, Bayley said she spends one to two hours a week helping people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to ride. She said she wishes it was more time, but with everything else, including an internship with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, she simply doesn’t have any extra time.

In the time that she does have for whichever activity she is involved in, Bayley wants to make sure that she can be her best.

“I’m really, really competitive,” she said. “It’s (eventing) something where I can be competitive and be competitive against myself, because every single show will present a different problem. Your horse acts differently every single day. I love being right there in the placings and trying to go up. That whole entire idea of doing my best in order to place or win is what I really like to do. I love that pressure.”

Bayley hopes she’s put herself in a position to extend her eventing career, possibly to the international stage, if she has anything to say about it.

“Long-term, I want to go to Young Riders because you have about 20 people in your division, and these people are from anywhere, Canada to Mexico, and these are the best young riders in North America,” said Bayley. She was actually already named to the team, but when her horse tore a ligament, her season this summer changed.

“I would like to go to an event that is the highest level they run in the world; there are only five in the world, and it’s in Lexington, Ken. That’s called Rolex (Kentucky),” she said. “Rolex is a big deal. It’s probably the biggest event in the world.” Bayley said another long-term goal would be to make the Olympic equestrian team.

“Pretty much they are going to be watching you for a couple of years, and you’re going to have to be competing at that level,” said Bayley. “They watch you and your horses and scores – they look for consistency. Then you get short listed and from there they take the safest bet. Soundness is a big problem at that level. My horse wasn’t even competing at that level yet, but I was getting ready to, and she tore a ligament. They are at very high risk for injury.”

Joan Bayley said they were very lucky in finding Savoy, who “can jump like a locomotive” and is a horse that will keep Bayley safe on the course.

But the sport is not without it’s risks. Riders and horses every year are injured badly, but Bayley said it isn’t something she can think about when she’s out riding.

“It can happen to anyone. If you go out on course thinking that something like that is going to happen you’re not going to get over the first jump,” she said. “You have to focus on doing everything right, right then and if something goes wrong you have to do your best to get out of it. Having a horse that can jump really big helps because if you have a horse that is maxed out at that height, they aren’t going to clear it as well as a horse that can go two feet higher.”

Right now Bayley said she’s jumping 3 feet 7 inches in cross country, preparing to move up another two inches, and in stadium she was is at 4 feet. Often, she said, the jumps are up to 6 feet wide, which makes the jumps even more complex because you really have to power the horse over it.

Despite the long hours spent with her horse and in the show ring, Bayley still maintains a solid GPA she said and plans to go to college when she graduates next year. While she said she would ideally like to go into medicine, majoring in pre-med would mean giving up on training for the Olympics.

For now she is focused on her upcoming senior year at MIHS and of course those daily treks to and from Fall City and to practice.