Christine Clayton has spent much of her life moving quickly through the world, both on foot and on horseback. But for the past 18 years, she’s lived on Route 83 in Pine Plains alongside her husband, Rodney Markgraf. After meeting in 1992, the couple has built a life together born out of love, both for one another and for all things equestrian.
An experienced marathon runner, she’s a former jockey and galloper (horse exerciser), who rehabilitates wild animals in what spare time she has from her part-time job teaching chemistry and math at Indian Mountain School in Lakeville.
Clayton grew up in Manhasset, on Long Island. “My sisters and I were crazy for horses,” she said, and her mother duly dropped them off once a week for lessons on caring for and riding them. There was a program in the high school, “like BOCES,” she said, that allowed for working at the race track, which her younger sister, Margie, participated in. When Clayton graduated from Gettysburg College with a double major in business (“my mother’s idea”) and art, her sister suggested she join her in working at the race track.
“I started out as a walker, then was a groom,” Clayton said. “I was sent to South Carolina, where I learned to exercise horses. It’s called ‘galloping.’ I galloped horses for 25 years.” In 1983 Clayton became a jockey — still an unusual occupation for women. Her first win was in October 1983 at Aqueduct on Lotus Delight.
“I’d exercise horses in the morning, and race them in the afternoon.” She raced on the east coast, at Belmont, Aqueduct, Meadowlands, Saratoga, and in Hialeah for just over two years.
“The race track world is a small world,” Clayton said. You eventually meet many people — and horses — on the circuit. Her sister, Margie, who was also a jockey and then a trainer, married Angel Cordero, celebrated as a winning jockey and inducted into the US Racing Hall of Fame.
Clayton met her husband, Rodney Markgraf, also a former jockey, at the Belmont race track when she was a free-lance galloper and he’d become a trainer. She was called in because it was known that she “would ride horses that were difficult horses,” she said. First thing in the morning, she’d arrive and exercise a horse named Ocean Splash.
“Rodney would braid my hair.” She teased him that on days she couldn’t come in he’d walk Ocean Splash instead of riding him. “Twenty years later he tells me that ‘No one else could ride the horse but you’.”
“She rode Kentucky Derby horses,” Markgraf said, as a galloper. Markgraf, from Wisconsin, started riding professionally at age 16. He raced for five years, starting in 1982.
“Generally, it’s a young person’s game,” Clayton said. “The hardest part is to keep your weight down. You’re weighed daily, and have to stay at 100 pounds or under. Jockeys are the fittest athletes, pound for pound,” she said. “You have to be strong.”
As a galloper, Clayton “worked with specific trainers. I worked with Sid Waters — a famous trainer in the Hall of Fame — for ten years. Loved it. But you get hurt a lot. At one point a horse fell on me and broke my back and pelvis. I was in a wheelchair for 8 months.”
Nevertheless, she got back on the horse and continued galloping. But she also continued her education.
Since horse exercising happens very early in the morning, and you’re done by 10:30, Clayton started taking classes in chemistry in the afternoon. “I’d always been interested in it,” she said.
After 1998, when their daughter Maggie was born, Clayton decided to get a master’s in education so that her schedule could correspond with their child’s. They lived in Kinderhook, where Markgraf managed a large horse farm, while she attended The College of St. Rose and did her student teaching in Catskill.
During this time, she began rehabilitating wild animals. A particularly memorable “save” was precipitated by a call from a hunter. “He’d found a hawk with a broken wing. He described exactly where he’d found it.” The hawk in fact had a recently dislocated shoulder, which made it unlikely that it would fly again. “But my sister is a vet, and she set it.” (Her sister, Barbara, is the veterinarian of Clayton Veterinary Care, also on Route 83 in Pine Plains.)
It took six months for the break to heal, during which time the hawk allowed Clayton to handle it. She’d take it out to an old barn on the property for it to practice flying once it was sufficiently healed. It would fly from one end to the other, and she’d run to that end and send it off again.
Eventually, after six months of recovery, “I took it back to the tree where the hunter had found it. It flew up to the tree and kind of squawked. And the female flew up and joined it! Hawks mate for life, and a six-month separation had not severed their bond.” She called her sister, and they both cried.
“I rehabilitated hawks, owls, other birds, squirrels, possums, skunks. The DEC and vets have my name, and people call me up. But now I just rehabilitate bunnies.”
After completing her master’s degree in 2005, Clayton was offered a teaching job at Indian Mountain in Lakeville. She and Markgraf were familiar with the area since they’d visited her sister Barbara, who had a veterinary practice in Pine Plains. Clayton’s mother had purchased an investment property on Route 83 that she was renting out.
When Clayton took the job in Lakeville 18 years ago, the couple and their young daughter moved to Pine Plains and bought the house they now live in from her mother. Markgraf found employment doing property management, and in 2015 started a horse transportation business.
A few years ago Clayton, always athletic, started training for marathons after participating in the Hilltop Half in Millbrook. “My daughter was in college at Northeastern in Boston, and I wanted to run in that marathon while she was still there.” She upped her usual run of five or six miles to more and trained for eight months. “You have to run 18 miles and do at least three 20-mile runs,” she said.
“To qualify for the Boston Marathon, you have to get a certain time in another marathon,” Clayton said. She registered for the marathon in Philadelphia, which doesn’t have pre-qualifying requirements. “I ran in that, and finished, and on the way home my husband was checking the results and we found out I’d won in my division!”
She qualified for Boston, and first ran the marathon 8 years ago. She ran the Boston twice. Another year that she qualified it was cancelled due to Covid, and once she didn’t compete because of an injury. She ran the Erie marathon four years ago.
“Lately, I just run six miles. I have a knee injury. Maybe from running, more likely from falls from horses.”
Clayton still rides as much as she can. She and her husband have six horses. Candy Apple, her daughter’s quarter horse, has been with them since he was three, and is 23 now. One is a lead pony, and four are retired race horses.
“We raced them, then when they can’t run, we bring them home.”
“The industries that use these horses — racehorses, polo horses, even show horses — treat them like commodities, not like sentient beings,” Clayton said. “If they can’t perform, they get rid of them. I treat them the best they can be treated. I’m gentle with them.”
Clayton looks forward to retiring from teaching soon, and likely spending more time with the animals.
“I love horses. I love riding them. I’d rather do that than anything else. I love to run, too, but I love riding more. Long runs put you in a good head place. But I love to ride. It’s exhilarating to go fast on a horse.”