By Sarah Maslin Nir
Portraits by Melissa Fuller
When Kate Murphy dresses a nick or a scrape on one of her horses at Murphy Show Stables in Colts Neck, New Jersey, she does something unusual—but which, if you think about it, should be the norm: she “scrubs-in,” meticulously cleansing her hands up to the elbows with sterile solution before she gets to work.
If it sounds like something you’ve seen on “E.R.,” that’s because it is: Before she became a professional equestrian, Kate was an emergency room nurse, working in high-volume, high-intensity trauma units where attention to detail, fastidious health care and a scrupulous bedside manner could quite literally mean the difference between life and death.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from nursing, as far as horses, it’s management of injuries—I feel as though I have a different understanding of the functionality of a horse’s body, what injury means for them and how to go about helping them heal,” Kate said the evening after coaching one of her Junior students to wins in the Children’s hunters and the Taylor Harris Insurance Services National Children’s Medal at WEF.
It has been three years since she went full-time pro, opening her own stables, and every step of the journey there has been one constant: applying her human husbandry techniques to every aspect of horse care. “If I wouldn’t put a bit in my own mouth, I won’t put it in my horse’s mouth,” she said. “I think I’m much more in tune to how horses are feeling because of being a nurse.”
Nurse Murphy may have left the trauma ward, but she’s still making rounds in the barn.
A Touch Horsey
Kate, 36, grew up in Scituate, Massachusetts. At age 6, she took a pony ride on Cookie, an “800-year-old black and white paint,” and like many of us, that was it—the horse bug had bitten, hard.
The daughter of a carpenter and a personal trainer, Kate came from a family that was only a touch horsey: As a little boy, her father had somehow bought himself a pony for a dollar and rode it bareback and self-taught around his parents’ peach and asparagus farm. One day, the family lore goes, he looked in the stall and there were two ponies: a surprise foal! But they indulged their daughters—Kate’s sister Chelsea loved horses, too—dutifully carting the kids to the barn with the only version of a “horse” the family could afford: a GMC diesel truck nicknamed Black Beauty.
Kate lost herself in barn chores, mucking and feeding to pay for her lessons, in part because she loved horses and in part because for much of her young life, home was tough: The shadow of mortal illness drifted through her house. Her mother, her biggest riding champion, was battling colon cancer, an ongoing war she fought—and won!—from when Kate was in second grade to high school. Battling alongside her mother cemented Kate’s decision to go into nursing.
“I remember waking up in the middle of the night and the ambulances were outside of our house—that feeling of not knowing what was going on, the helplessness,” she said. “I never wanted to feel like that again.” Kate vowed to be part of the solution.
But at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Kate struggled—not academically with her degrees in psychology and biology, but with a sense of not belonging; horses were not part of her routine in college at first, and without them for the first time in her life, she felt lost. “I missed the horses, I missed the camaraderie, all of it,” she said.
Enter Dante, a 7-year-old Hanoverian dressage horse who had never jumped a jump but who, with one white star and three white socks, just so happens to look exactly like Black Beauty. Mother and daughter snuck off to take a look at him. “She was just humoring me,” Kate insisted, but her mother scraped to buy Dante—little knowing that he would go on to a stellar hunter career and, 18 years later at the age of 25, play leadline pony to Kate’s own 3-year-old daughter. With her horse to center her, Kate joined the university riding team, and found her herd. “Five of us from the riding team are on a group chat. We still speak every single day,” she said.
Healing and Horses
During the summers, Kate worked for Julie Chandler at Fieldstone Farm, and as a freshman in college took a gaggle of children all the way to Pony Finals. But Kate had learned something vital during her brief horseless time: She needed both her passions, healing and horses, in her life to be happy. A few years after obtaining her nursing degree from what was then Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, New Jersey, Kate went to work: both at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, where she worked overnights, and with Frank Hernandez at Pine Bridge Farm in Southampton, New Jersey, where she trained horses during her “day shift,” so to speak. She even dashed off to Florida on her days off to coach clients on the circuit.
“I have never been a big sleeper,” Kate said of her incredible feat of stamina. “And if you want something bad enough, you’ll make something happen.”
Kate does it all, from horse care to coaching adult re-riders to ambitious Juniors to developing ponies. But her favorite part of the sport is bringing along young horses. “If you treat them well and you show them how to do their job instead of tell them how to do their job, they can be confident, calm, happy and perform.” With her patient bedside manner, Kate refuses to force a horse to do anything, as a credo. At one long-ago job for a top rider, after she was berated for riding a young horse without spurs, she dismounted, left the ring and never returned.
And then, 2020 happened. Murphy found herself on the front line of a global health crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic. She was also newly married to her husband, Kevin, and pregnant, and promoted to the position of nurse manager, presiding over a team of medical professionals. “I was wearing a hazmat suit to work,” she said. The pressure on her team was extraordinary, but so was their resolve. “We saw some horrible things, but when people need you to be strong for them, you have to be strong.”
Helping her cope was Remi, show name Rhythmic. She’s a Hanoverian filly from North Carolina whom Kate’s grandfather encouraged her to buy at 10 months old while Kate was providing him hospice care in 2019. She had been showing her grandfather horse videos in the intensive care unit to entertain him when he insisted Remi was “the one.” “She had never had a halter on,” Kate said. “She came home the day of his funeral.”
A jaw-dropping mover with an 11 jump, Remi has never earned anything less than first place in a hunter hack class to date—with the rare exception of Devon Horse Show, when she took second. “She’ll be my 3-year-old daughter’s Junior hunter one day. She’s forever,” Kate said.
Horses Full Time
After the premature birth of her daughter Darrah—show name Spitfire—Kate took time to reevaluate. She struggled with a sense of loss of identity postpartum, and believes she went into labor early that November 2020 in part because of the extreme stress the pandemic put on essential workers like her. She began riding during her maternity leave, and soon—because this is Kate, who doesn’t seem to need to sleep at all—had 15 clients. Once again, horses helped her find her center. It was time to make them her full-time life.
“I loved the nurses that I worked with, the doctors, the techs, the janitorial staff—everyone in the hospital is there because they want to make a difference,” she said. “But there’s an emotional connection to the animal, the horse, that makes it worth it, and nursing can be very thankless.”
But in the barn in Colts Neck, where Kate cares for her 26 client horses, her nursing background is never far behind. When her beloved 16-year-old dog Lily collapsed at Vermont Summer Festival last summer, Kate was on her knees providing CPR; today Lily is thriving, and still Darrah’s favorite playmate. Each horse receives IV fluids from a veterinarian to rehydrate after long-haul trailer rides, and when horses leave Kate’s care, they go with a detailed “Continuity of Care” note; Kate has modeled her write-ups after the overnight hand-off notes she used to write to the day nurses’ shift for her patients. And in the feed room, Kate’s grain protocol cribs from the “med passes,” daily doses of medicines, she used to assemble for patients. “There are five ‘rights’ you have to get correct: Right medication, right patient, right route, right time and right dose,” she said. “I think about grain the same way: The way my brain works is from nursing.”
With a smidge more time on her hands, Kate has begun to reach toward those lofty equestrian goals that felt so far away in the flatbed of her father’s GMC Black Beauty, or in the halls of the trauma unit. Yet through hard work and a bare minimum of sleep, she has started to achieve them. Highlights have included bringing her client Christine Quinn’s Belgian Warmblood by Tangelo van de Zuuthoeve—Lion, show name Halcyon—to Green Incentive Finals in Kentucky, scoring in the high 80s at WEF on half a dozen client horses this past season, and developing her new Dutch Warmblood, Dice, show name Paradise, for the International Derby arena—and, she says, the daily satisfaction of teaching her students.
“Watching what you say helps someone to truly enjoy the sport and feel fulfilled, and have it turn into making them better based on your ability to get to them, that’s really special,” Kate said. “I also loved that in nursing. I’ve always loved to help people to be better.”
Though these days you’re more likely to find her in the schooling ring six days a week than in triage, Kate keeps her nursing license current, even during this phase of life as a full-time equine professional. She feels it’s deeply important to be at the ready in case another crisis like the pandemic demands her service.
“If there was an eighth day of the week, I would choose that for nursing,” Kate said with a laugh, holding Darrah after a long day at WEF. “But there are only seven—and the seventh day is for my daughter.”
For more information, visit murphyshowstables.com
Photos by Melissa Fuller, melissafullerphotography33.mypixieset.com
