First Season Eventer

I’m Claire and I am about to embark on my first ever BE eventing season with my young horse Riley who is also a first timer at this eventing malarkey!  I’ve been kindly asked by e-Venting team to write a fortnightly blog throughout this year which I hope will be of interest to those who are also embarking on their eventing journey, entertaining for those seasoned competitors reading about my trials and tribulations and maybe provide inspiration to those who have thought about eventing but have not had a go.

For my first instalment I just want to give you an insight into me, my riding background and of course, my partner in crime, my horse Riley.

So here goes…..

I work full time as an IT Manager and live with my partner, Paul.  I’m 36 (Scary!) and have been riding for just over 23 of those years.  I’ve been fortunate to have owned horses for most of those years.  I’ve only really started completing at local shows and unaffiliated competitions in the last few years as this is when I acquired myself some transport. I am in some ways lucky that my family owns a farm and I can keep my horse there, which is great for saving on livery costs but not so great by that I have no electric in the stables and no arena, but hey ho beggars can’t be choosers and you can’t have it all!  So as you can see I have pretty humble equine roots and I do the best I can with what I have got and at the end of the day I absolutely love riding and for me that’s what it’s all about and the enjoyment of riding my horse makes up for those cold dark mornings/evenings mucking out by torchlight!

I have an amazing mum who is a massive supporter of me and Riley.  She is an unpaid groom and helps by mucking out and feeding when I have work commitments and whenever possible she will come along to competitions and training sessions with me, as she loves to see how mine and Riley’s partnership develops and grows

Riley is a 6yr old 17hh ISH, he has some nice breeding lines – Sired by Star Kingdom whose lines link back to King of Diamonds and his dam, Churchfield Betty, was from Show Jumping lines from a stallion called Golden Cliff who John Whitaker campaigned a few years back.   I bought Riley in the Summer of 2011 with the hope to go out eventing with him.  He hadn’t done much other than had some basic schooling so for our first year together I have tried to build on the basics and establish good foundations with his training.  As with most youngsters we’ve had our ups and downs initially Riley was not happy to have anything but a flexible rubber snaffle in his mouth and getting him to engage his brain to his toes is shall we say an ongoing process but he is a big lad and it is all coming together slowly.  Last year we did some unaffiliated comps and local shows with mixed results.

We started the year with a combined training competition and a somewhat comedic dressage test as Riley was so engrossed in the horse in the next arena he literally fell over a dressage board and marker!  So from then on I knew his attention to the job needed a lot more work!  I tried to do as much as I could with Riley last year and we did manage 3 unaffiliated ODE events during the summer, the first one we got an average dressage score, clear SJ and then had a stop XC because Riley far too busy looking at the camera man and fence judges! 2^nd ODE was pretty much the same with another stop out XC, again because he was not focused on the job in question.  A few months and a lot more training later we had our 3^rd ODE and this time there was significant improvement both from my riding and also Riley’s focus.  We did a good dressage test, went Clear Show jumping and then for the first time went clear XC which resulted in us being placed 2^nd.

On a buzz from this I went to the BE website, managed to get through the registering minefield, and got a training ticket to enter Riley into West Wilts BE80(T).   Event day came – My dressage warm up could have gone a lot better but fortunately Riley managed to focus and engage his brain to his feet once we were called to do our test.  Show jumping again went well and we got a clear round and so we went out onto the XC with the hope we could have another clear round like the previous event and to my joy we did and most of all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.  Now I am not one for looking at my scores until I have finished all 3 phases so off I trotted to the score board to find we had finished on a score of 29! Smiles all around at this point and then as the class finished an even bigger smile emerged as we ended up in 4^th place.

And so here we are at the start of 2013.  We’ve had a quiet winter and from now until the end of the season I will be blogging my training and competitions ups and downs and I hope you will join me and Riley in our BE Eventing journey……