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in this business that’s fortunate,” says Jason Olmstead of Pryor, Oklahoma, who has trained their horses for about 15 years.
THE EARLY YEARS
Maren’s introduction to the horse industry came at age five, when her dad and her horse- loving mom took her and her brother, John, to a dude ranch in Montana. When they returned home, John and Maren continued to ride. “I was the kid kicking and screaming when they tried to pull me off the horse at age five,” she says. “I got my first horse at 11 and my brother was 14 or 15. We both competed but he finally got out of it. My mom’s love and passion bled into me, and Paul and I found each other through horses.”
Paul’s family was much less involved, although one sister-in-law and niece are involved in barrel racing. Paul—a painting and sheetrock contractor—and Maren met when he took some riding lessons from her.
In 1989, the same year they married, one
of Paul’s fellow contractors, Al Lundgren, convinced him to partner with him on a racehorse. “I did and that’s all it took,” Paul says.
The horse was Changin Gears, the 1985 son of Super Sound Charge and out of the Jet Deck daughter Lilyjet. “I’d say that if there’s one horse that kicked the passion out of the ballpark for us, it was him,” Maren says.
“Back then, our trainer was Tommy Winkle,” Paul explains. “He said there was a horse running in a $4,000 claimer at Canterbury Park and
we had to claim him; he said the horse needed
to go long-distance and he was only being run
at shorter distances. Tommy said he knew that Changin Gears was going to be a great horse.”
In Changin Gears’ sixth claiming race in 1989, Paul and Al became the lucky partners who won the shake against 10 other parties that had claimed him.
“That was the end of the meet at Canterbury,” Paul says. “Up until then, he had
only run 330 yards, and we took him down
to Remington Park and put him back in a claimer going 440 yards. He set a track record there. Then at Claremore, he set a record at 550. His speed indexes were 123, 117, 113— the longer the race, the faster he’d be. We even got invited to the Bartlesville Handicap at Remington Park.
“I remember going down there to the pre-party for it and a guy said we had a nice horse, but we were really stepping up in the competition in this race. Well, Changin Gears blew them all away by four lengths! Al and I knew we had a distance champion for the next year. If you put him in a long-distance race, whatever it was, he lived up to his name; he’d change gears and just take off!”
“It was kind of like watching Secretariat coming around the hook and all of a sudden he’d leave the field in the dirt,” Maren adds. “It was unbelievable.”
The talented gelding won four consecutive races for the partners that year and his records
stood at Will Rogers Downs and Remington Park for many years. “If I wasn’t bit [by the race bug] before that, I was definitely bit after,” Paul says.
Paul and longtime trainer Jason Olmstead
Susan Bachelor, Speedhorse
“The horses run in the summer and our cabin in Wisconsin is on Summer Road. Our brand, which is on our silks, is SR with a cross around it because the ranch has been a blessing to us.”
– Maren Luedemann
60 SPEEDHORSE November 2023