Just enjoy it

For competitive amateurs, many outside influences can derail show-day focus. Madeleine Silver learns how to ease the stress to make the most of our sport

- Madeleine Silver

FUELLED by a corner of bacon sandwich and a slurp of coffee, logistics for school pick-up racing through your mind and a work call to squeeze in before your dressage test: welcome to an amateur’s competition day. Just getting to the start line can feel Herculean, an inevitability to that bubbling adrenaline as your start time looms.

“I think we need a bit of the adrenaline, don’t we? It makes us sharper,” says eventer, dressage rider, marketing manager and part-time model Sophie Hall, who is well-versed in balancing her career with the yearning for a good outcome in the ring. “My year-end feedback at work was that I’m like a swan, and I think that being a rider and constantly putting yourself under a lot of pressure has definitely helped in other parts of my life, with the ability to compartmentalise.

“But I am not going to pretend that I don’t get nervous. I do, and it’s probably the expectation that I put on my own shoulders. It’s the fear of disappointment. So, I’ve had to work hard at managing my own competitive nature and trying to focus that nervous energy on driving me rather than crushing me in the moment.”

For Surrey-based sport psychologist Jo Davies, normalising stress for riders is her first step with clients seeking a calmer competition experience.

“People almost get anxious about feeling anxious,” she says. “There is a part of the brain that is designed to detect threat or danger. It stops us from doing daft things like walking in front of cars. But on a competition day, inevitably, it’s still at work and it will spot dangers around us, whether they are a real danger, like your horse getting loose, or a danger that you can plan for like how to ride a fence you know your horse won’t like.