There are any number of reasons why these facts could fill, even overwhelm, you with anxiety. Perhaps you’ve been in a slump and are desperate to break out of it. Perhaps the opposite is true, and you feel intense pressure to stay at the top. Maybe the owner of your horse has been subtly letting you know that you won’t continue to have the ride unless you win.
Are you coming off an injury and experiencing real physical fear? Do you suffer from stage fright and have that awful, sick feeling in the pit of your stomach? Is your horse tough and difficult to ride? Has he been hot in dressage, or stopping at his fences? Have you had some bad falls recently?
Whatever the reasons, welcome to the real world of the competitive athlete. If someone were to ask you whether, at this very moment, you’d rather be in the safety of your own home cleaning the toilet with a toothbrush, your honest answer would be, yes.
Fear, anxiety, pre-competition nerves, butterflies, stage fright’all of these are age-old “fight-or-flight” mechanisms. Thousands of years of evolution have programmed our species to respond just this way.
Some of us get so debilitated by nervousness that we virtually cease to function, while others seem almost impervious to pressure.
I remember years ago a group of three-day riders were sitting around discussing whom our choice would be to ride into the Olympic arena, having to get a clean show jumping round for us to win the gold medal. The consensus was that it should be Mike Plumb. “He thrives on pressure,” was the general opinion.
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On the other hand, there was a goalie for the Boston Bruins, of the National Hockey League, named Terry Sawchuk. He was named Goalie of the Year five times, an extraordinary athletic feat, yet he supposedly got so nervous that he threw up before every game. How can somebody handle that kind of nervous intensity and still function, we might well wonder?
Probably many of us find that we can ride better at home, be more relaxed and supple, and can see our distances to fences better than we can in a show ring.
When things become too important, we tend to try harder. When we try harder, we tend to become stiffer and less flexible. When we become stiffer, our horses, which are, after all, creatures of flight, pick up on our tensions. So they get tenser because of us. So then our tension increases, the horses reciprocate, and everything begins to snowball downhill into disaster.
How do we break this cycle? I’ve read dozens of articles written by top sport psychologists that deal with this very topic, so it’s by no means an unexplored phenomenon. If I had anything to add, it would be that I don’t think anything will completely get rid of the pre-competition nerves. (Well, other than illegal drugs.) Those butterflies will always be there, but there are real coping strategies that can limit the debilitating side effects.
Ask yourself three questions:
1) Am I physically tough and fit? Vince Lombardi, the great football coach, once said, “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.” Unfit, unathletic people probably should feel nervous, because eventing is a tough, slam-bang kind of sport. I’ve always found it interesting that so many event riders believe that they’re immune to the physical demands that drive athletes in other sports to run, lift weights, and do whatever it takes to get tough.
2) Am I sitting on a good horse? If you’re on a hot, nervous horse, a rusher, a quitter, a spinner or a rearer, your tension is completely understandable.
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3) Am I thoroughly prepared? If you know your dressage test and have assiduously practiced all the pieces, your anxiety level should be tolerable. If you’ve jumped lots of stadium courses, learned how to balance and adjust your horse’s canter, and have jumped hundreds, preferably thousands of fences, this will put your mind at some ease.
If you’re comfortable with the sensation of galloping in the open, if you can control your horse on all kinds of terrain, if you have practiced ditches and drops, water and banks, bounces and corners and angles, then you’ll know you’re ready. If you haven’t done your homework properly, you probably have good reason to be nervous.
All three of these choices’fitness, preparedness, and the horses we ride’are just that, choices. We have control over these three key ingredients to our success or failure, but only if we choose to exercise that control. Even if we’ve made good choices, we’re still going to be nervous, but we can take some solace from two facts:
One, no matter how cool they may appear on the outside, all the other riders on the grounds are just as nervous as we are (except for Mike Plumb).
Two, if we’re fit, prepared and appropriately mounted, our nerves, while unpleasant, are highly unlikely to get us into any trouble.
And, there’s one other weird little fact. You know that rush of euphoria you feel when you come galloping through the finish flags? That exquisite high that you so inordinately crave? You wouldn’t feel so great afterward if you hadn’t felt so terrible before.
