In the last few seasons, it seems a larger more and more eventers have started migrating south for the winter, some leaving even before most birds do! This trend could be progressing for many reasons; the riders’ fears of temperatures below sixty degrees, their want of competitions to go to ten months out of the year, or maybe they just prefer to get the entire farm moved, set-up, and settled before the holidays arrive. Regardless, it makes the many of us still up north wonder what to do for the next few months without a coach and with limited facility usage once the weather really does turn cold, as some don’t go South until the new year, and some don’t go at all.
The cold (pun intended) reality is that without the proper facilities, training an event horse becomes a difficult task. Simply due to the nature of the sport, eventing requires various settings to practice on. In an ideal world, you’d have access to a full-length dressage arena, another flat area with show jumps that’s also large enough to school in, hills with good footing to do conditioning work on but also to practice flatwork on, and an area with various cross country fences. These are the basics, you could go on to include the need for hacking trails, a prepared gallop, and if you’ve recently won the lottery, a swimming pool and hyperbaric chamber. Anyone who has daily access to a dressage arena, course of show jumps, hills, and cross-country schooling should count themselves lucky, but even those lucky individuals are faced with the prospect of limited riding areas once the snow and ice arrives. The question then becomes, how do you improvise and make do with what you have?
As most northerners (myself included) know, if you spend the entire winter schooling in an indoor arena, on the flat with an occasional jump school, you will come out in the spring with a very stale and rusty horse. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to craft exercises that keep your horse sharp and ever progressing up the training ladder, even when you can’t practice outside. Winter is the perfect time to perfect the many varieties of those hateful ground pole/cavaletti exercises, or really any exercise that fits into the category of “simple to understand, difficult to correctly complete.” Every case is different, but those types of exercises will probably improve your horse’s training more this winter, than say, jumping a large show jump course set at competition length distances would. Also, winter can be a good time to improvise and practice certain cross-country obstacles that may have been your nemesis last year. Barrels can be fashioned into corners or skinnies, tarps can be used as ditches, and with careful thought, you can place those fences in a way that best simulates the reaction you’d get from your horse on an actual cross country course. For example, if you were to place a bounce coming out of a corner so it’s late into the horse’s line of vision, you’ll get some version of the “holding” feeling that you’d feel while approaching a bounce into water on a cross-country course. It’s important to remember though, that while certain pieces of cross-country technique can be improved in an arena setting, cross-country is most effectively and safely ridden with pace in the flow of a course. Just be sure appropriate questions are being asked of your horse when you practice cross-country simulations in an arena.
Another problem that winter presents is conditioning, either in preparation for a late winter season south or an early spring season up north. It’s impossible to correctly and safely condition your horse solely in an indoor arena. You are going to need some outdoor area that has passable footing, and that area really needs to have some form of an incline. Indoor arenas are almost always too small to do canter sets in, and even if they weren’t, having no incline and completely uniform footing wouldn’t produce the hardened and tough athletes that event horses need to be. In most cases, the conditioning dilemma simply means waiting until the ice melts to start conditioning work more intense than the regular arena work your horse has been in up until this point. Just make sure that your horse has been conditioned over a long enough period of time so that, by the first competition, he is truly fit in all structures of his body; heart, muscles, tendons, and ligaments, taking into consideration that the heart is the first structure to gain condition, while the soft tissue structures are the last.
So, Eventing Nation, I’d like to hear your thoughts. What are some of your favorite schooling exercises? Any tips on conditioning with limited facilities? Any other winter words of wisdom?
Go Eventing. Or try this.
