Christine and Myal High Omega placed 4th in the first class and 9th overall in the Equimillion 80cm Open Two Phase. Image by: Rodney’s Photography

Seven tips to prepare for your first competition

Want to take your horse to their first jumping competition? CHRISTINE ARMISHAW recently had the experience of doing just that.

Taking your inexperienced or young horse to their first jumping competition may cause you some sleepless nights. Wondering how it will all unfold and how they’ll react can make the whole thing seem pretty daunting. So here are seven of the things I focussed on in the leadup to taking Myal High Omega (Melman), my five-year-old, 18hh off the track Thoroughbred to Equimillion, his very first jumping competition:

1. Have a goal: Having a goal is the golden key. It’s one thing to decide you’ll take your horse to their first competition when they’re ‘ready’, but it’s another thing altogether to pick the event, pay the entry fee, and begin working towards a looming deadline. But, like tearing off a band aid, it has to be done. So, pick your event and work towards it.

With Melman in the Equimillion New Star Led class. Image by: Rodney’s Photography

2. Your horse can do more than you think: I’d been working Melman with the plan of entering him in the lowest class at Equimillion. I figured we’d be able to steer around a 65cm course, but exactly three weeks out from the event, I discovered we weren’t eligible for the 65cm. So we had to enter the 80cm class and suddenly I had to get him ready to ride a course much bigger than we’d planned.

The point is that in those last three weeks, I doubled down and rode every single day bar three days – in one of those I gave him an in-hand session, and the other two days he had off. Many riders think you’ve got to take it easy, you shouldn’t overwork your horse – and I agree. You shouldn’t overwork them, but you can work them more than you might think. They’re horses after all, they’re designed to roam for miles a day as part of a herd. And I know that if I hadn’t worked Melman as I did, it would not have panned out well!

3. Train them higher at home: Train higher at home than the height at which you’re planning to compete. At the beginning of those three weeks, when Melman was still spooking at cross rails, 90cm felt daunting. But slowly and progressively, day by day we built the jumps up, and I can tell you that I took great delight in measuring them!

As we got higher he didn’t stop and he didn’t knock them down. Finally we were actually jumping rounds of 90cms at home, with even the odd 1.0m fence thrown in for good measure. Then, on the day, with all the nerves, excitement and adrenaline, when I went into the ring to walk the course, the 80cm jumps didn’t actually feel that big – and the psychological impact that has on you is really positive.

4. Train for the worst case scenario: I had no idea what the course designer for Equimillion, which is quite a high profile competition, would come up with. I thought they might get creative and I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

So I pulled out all the scariest things I could find at home and trained Melman over them until he felt comfortable with them all. We had an orange and yellow brick wall, a double sided filler painted white on one side and covered in green plastic foliage on the other, a tarp on the ground acting as a Liverpool, and the scariest thing of all, the big black planks that petrified him. It took him until four days before the competition to become comfortable to the point where he took me over to have a look at them rather than me taking him!

On the day, in the 45 seconds you have in the ring before you ride the course, I showed Melman all the ‘scary’ jumps and he was completely nonchalant. All the scary stuff at home had made the jumps on course significantly less scary. It really is all about repetition, repetition, repetition.

5. Train in a smaller space: I trained Melman in a space smaller than the one we expected to compete in. If you don’t have access to an indoor arena, peg off a small area in the paddock and train over courses with really tight turns and short approaches. Then on the day, it will be much easier to ride the course in a full size jumping arena.

6. Get off property: You must get off property and ride somewhere else so you have an idea of what your horse is likely to do. Before Equimillion, I took Melman to Pony Club several times to practice jumping off site and to see how he would react to being away from home – and he actually did get better with each outing.

But what I learned, which I wouldn’t have otherwise known, was that being off site hotted him up and he had to be lunged before being ridden, even though we’d passed that stage at home. So now we knew we needed to make time for lunging to be part of our competition warm up routine, and that was a game changer.

7. Enjoy the moment: While this may be your first ever event together, as with every competition you should take it seriously. Do your best, enjoy the moment, and view the whole thing as training for your young or inexperienced horse. However, once it’s over, relax – because the only thing that matters then is what you learned from it. Whether you come home with a ribbon or not, you did it.

Christine Armishaw Equestrian offers a variety of coaching and other equestrian services at her Otford Valley Equestrian Agistment & Training Centre just south of Sydney, NSW.