Page 41 - NM Winter 2023

What do you call someone cheeseburger with fries at lunchtime. was my life, and I did it for 11 years,
And feasted like a half-starved ranch hand when the sun went down.
The answer will sound worse than stupid to a lot of people who don’t understand the sport of horse racing, but Fincher was hell-bent on making weight so a trainer could leg him up to the back of a horse one more time, and one more time after that, and as many times after that as possible. But the next time always depended on where the needle stopped on the scale, and that depended on the Coke and the M&Ms.
But, again, why?
“Because I would still swap training for riding any day of the week,” Fincher said. “There’s nothing like it. It’s an adrenaline-rush, flying on the edge. I lived and breathed it every day. Riding
whose daily menu consists of
one diet Coke and one regular size bag of peanut M&Ms?
Answer: Hungry.
The true-to-life answer is you call him Todd Fincher. One diet Coke, which he sipped mindfully, almost reverently, throughout the day. One package of peanut M&Ms, consumed one-at-a-time, savoring the chocolate, trying to allow every taste bud a scrap of flavor, and being especially grateful for the occasional M&M with the mega-size peanut.
That was Fincher’s 24/7 diet for a very long time. But why?
He could have rolled out of bed to dive into bacon and eggs and potatoes. He could have pulled up a chair to a
from 16 to 27-years-old.”
Fincher was close to six-feet tall when
he began riding, growing quickly beyond that mark within the next 24-months. The number on the scale headed upward darned fast when the weight of that much bone settled on it. There was enough room left for only a very thin layer of flesh, enough room for one diet Coke and one bag of peanut M&Ms.
“I could eat a little bit more when I was younger,” Fincher said. “Not a lot but more than the Coke and the M&Ms.“
Fincher was riding better and better, but maintaining his weight was getting harder. No matter how determined he was, he knew his list of “next times” was getting shorter.
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