United States Eventing Association

I first heard about the American Eventing Championships two years ago. At the time I was thirteen, and the Olympics seemed a mighty high goal for someone who had just moved up to the novice level. Yet here was a perfect show, a perfect event, a perfect goal for me. The best novice level kids competing to be the best novice level kid! Here were the Olympics at my level!

I immediately looked up the qualifications. One first, one second or two thirds at novice would send me there. Why not? My horse was an 11 year old, 15.3hh thoroughbred mare; KC was perfectly athletic and there was no reason we could not bump up the dressage in time for show season. So we did just that; lessons and 10-degree rides all winter to ensure our trip to the AECs. And as show season dawned on us, the idea of going to the AECs became not so much a dream, but a goal.

But the first show came and then the second with no first places, not even thirds. We regularly placed somewhere around 9th. What was wrong? Why couldn’t we qualify? I never had a fault on cross-country. And we had the occasional rail down, but not many. Why were we not leading the victory gallop straight to the championships? It was dressage. It was all in the dressage. My high hopes had led to high nerves. And KC turned out to be quite sensitive. When I got nervous, her gaits became something resembling a sewing machine, and she never stopped chomping on the bit. My tests were silver lined with the comments “tense” and “needs to relax”. But I just couldn’t calm down! I started getting nervous about getting nervous. And the whole show season went the same way. A step of “tracking up” became a miracle and I just couldn’t keep my hands still due to her incessant mouthing the bit.

But as we reached the end of the summer (with no ticket to the AECs) it was becoming time to move up to training. Novice jumps were just too small and KC’s jumping style had become horrendous due to tripping over the jumps. We finished the year off with a training level event. Dressage was more of the same, cross country was awesome and stadium? I was lucky to stay on.

By now, my hopes of going to the AECs were dwindling. It seemed to me that the kids on push button ponies with arenas to drill jumping and dressage were the ones who went. (My pad consists of a collection of trails and a generally muddy little circle in the woods.) And now there was this problem of stadium. My mare was constantly dropping rails, and I had no idea why! My mother proceeded to sign me up for jumping lessons with Nadeem Noon, on the hopes that they would be much cheaper than a cat scan and much less trouble than a wheelchair. So we immediate took apart all that I was doing, and started fresh. Controlling the canter, teaching KC that jumping is no big deal, crashing jump after jump to teach her to fend for herself a bit, and in the meantime my seat was getting tighter and tighter thanks to Nad’s coaching.

Dressage was still a big problem. So I started a different approach. I asked everyone I could find what to do. I looked in every book and internet article for what to do with a tense, choppy horse and a nervous-at-shows rider. I came up with huge panoply of advice, and tried most of it out. I learned a hard lesson about picking and choosing advice when many experienced trainers told me to use different assortments of nosebands to tie her mouth shut. The results were disastrous. My first five minute encounter with a flash resulted in two hours of trying to calm her down again. I eventually figured out that all her gait and mouthy problems came directly from me. That was when I started expecting less and rewarding more. KC relaxed more and *gasp* started tracking up! It was that that spurred a long winter-campaign of looking into sports-psychology and methods of controlling nerves, ways to sit stiller so as not to confuse her with excess “bumping” and many other methods of calming down and relaxing.

Now at this point in time, I was nearing the second show season since my original goal was set. I had a whole different horse in stadium and a whole new way to ride dressage. I set no goals for my first show, I hardly thought about it at all for the fear that nerves would set in if I dwelt on it too much. The show was Spring Bay Horse Trials in early April. The weather turned out to be absolutely terrible, pouring down freezing rain the whole time, the dressage arena had deep mud-tracks on the twenty-meter circles and the centerline looked like a slip-n’-slide. HA! This was my show! The horses that had been doing perfect-twenty-meter circles in warmed indoor arenas all winter had no idea how to go through mud. KC is a skilled veteran at this and pulled off a 33% merely by the fact that the arena footing was just like our “riding circle” at home. Then came cross country. About two thirds of the entries withdrew before cross country, but walking the course I decided to go for it. Yes it was muddy, yes it was deep, but KC was fit and seems to be almost more confident in bad footing. For the first time we had her shoes drilled for studs, so my mom and I spent some time huddled in the trailer, in the rain, trying to figure out how to put them on. Onward we went. She never misplaced a step through the whole cross country course. And we rounded off the whole thing with a clear round in stadium jumping, putting us in first place. I even forgot to be nervous!

This was it. We had qualified for The American Eventing Championships. We were going to Illinois in September; it was actually going to happen, much, much later and a level higher than I had originally thought. The rest of the summer flew by with events, 4-H, Pony Club Rally and lessons, never taking our eye off of the much-anticipated goal of the AEC.

Then suddenly it was the night before the event. My mom and I painted the car with “AEC or bust!” and “Go Team Awesome!” KC was groomed to the nines and the trailer was packed. Then before we knew it we had made the 5 1/2 hour drive and were there, at Lamplight Equestrian Center in Wayne. After unloading and unpacking, I took KC out on a hack to see the show grounds and get acquainted with the place. While cantering around in the warm-up ring I saw someone I distantly recognized, my mom quickly looked up his number and we exploded in fits of giggles because I had just cantered around John Williams! It didn’t stop there. We regularly saw Darren Chiacchia leading horse after horse out of the barn, and my dressage warm-up was made awesome just by the fact that Karen O’Connor was helping a student warm up in the same arena. This was SO cool! KC was energetic and fresh but I was able to convert that energy into big gaits and a round frame. During the test we had a few mistakes that stuck out, a jig in the free walk, an abrupt transition or two, and one of my worst halts ever (she backed up and stuck her nose out). And as the test went by we slowly lost our big calm trot. But overall it was one of my better tests. We ended up with a 39% (the Judge judged it like a championship and seemed to give out 4s to movements with any sort of flaw) and we were tied for 38th place out of 54.

The next day was cross country. The course was challenging in places and easy in places, the hard factor was the time. The speed was 470 mpm and lots of people were getting time penalties. The first part of the course was somewhat spread out with a lot of room for galloping, I took this part at almost a prelim speed, really pushing on to get ahead of time. I knew I would have to slow way down for the three banks-down and various tight turns and combinations. KC was stunning and never hesitated during the whole course, and we passed through the finish flags with 8 second left, in other words, double clear. After cross country we moved up to be tied for 31st place.

Each night there was a competitors’ party, which were cold and sparsely turned out. But Friday night there was a live DJ with music. After a crowd of adults had had a beer or two the dancing started. I was powered not by alcohol but by being 15. And it wasn’t until about an hour or two into the dancing that I found out I was grooving with the owner of Bit of Britain!

Saturday was my day off, but the advanced, intermediate and preliminary divisions had their cross country Saturday, so my mom and I volunteered to jump judge. We watched many excellent riders come through the challenging courses; my personal favorites of the day were Darren Chiacchia riding Windfall II and Becky Holder with Courageous Comet. Both put in AWESOME rounds that were really something to watch.

The last day was stadium. We had walked the course the evening before so we sat down to watch the Training Amateur and the Beginner Novice divisions. The Training level course was adequate, with a roll back turn, two combinations and some big oxers. There were many people who had one or two rails down. Then the Beginner Novice division was quite fun to watch. The overnight winner, who had had a 19% on dressage turned out to not be qualified to compete, this put my (and my mom’s) favorite Norwegian Fjord, SNF Maarta with Lauren Chumley in first! It was awesome because SNF Maarta was the smallest horse in the division (13.3hh) and is just about as cute as they come.

Onwards to my division. When each rider went they announced over the loudspeaker a little about each pair from a bio sheet you had to fill out earlier on. My mom had filled out my bio sheet, so when it was my turn to go they announced that KC and I had won barrel racing, pole bending, flag racing and keyhole race in a dressage saddle at the 4-H fair earlier this summer, And KC certainly did the course like a contesting horse, fast and speedy. Over one jump early on I lost my reins and couldn’t get them back until about five jumps later, needless to say she took off and jumped very flat over those jumps, I was lucky to only drop one of those rails. Otherwise the course went well. Because so many people dropped rails, we still managed to move up one place to land us in 30th. I couldn’t be happier.

What I would say was the best thing about the AEC was that every single person who was there really wanted to be there. Many people had driven up to 15 hours (or more!) to get there and everyone was darn well going to have a good time. Walking through the barns, everyone was laughing and having fun. I talked to many people who finished near dead-last in their classes but still were having a blast. I am most definitely going back to the AEC, and next year, it will be at Prelim.