Lessons from walking the course with a five-star eventer

The morning was already warm when I pulled into the float park at Boneo, earlier than I needed to be because my stomach had been doing flips since half past five. Archie was munching his hay net with zero concern while I sat in the ute with a half-finished takeaway coffee from the servo, rereading the text I'd received two weeks earlier. A five-star rider — proper, proper, Badminton and Burghley kind of rider — had offered to walk the course with a small group before the CCI.

What got me most wasn't the chance to chat to someone who'd ridden at that level. It was the reminder that course walking, which I've always treated as a tick-the-box exercise before heading back to the float, is one of the most useful tools an eventer has. I'd been doing it lazily for years. By the end of the day, my notebook was full and my perspective on preparation had shifted in a way I didn't entirely expect.

Treating the walk as a dressage test of its own

The first thing she said, almost before we'd reached the start box, was that walking the course well is a discipline in itself. Not something you squeeze in between cleaning tack and braiding. She talked about the walk the way my coach talks about a 20-metre circle — something you do with intention, with rhythm, with your brain fully engaged rather than drifting off towards the coffee cart.

We started by walking the whole track at a comfortable pace, just to get a feel for the land and where the hills sat in relation to the key fences. She pointed out that the brain needs time to absorb the layout before it starts solving problems. If you start picking lines from fence one, your brain gets crowded before you've even seen the combinations at five and six. Let the course speak first, she said, then start asking questions.

This was a fairly foreign concept to me. I've always been the one marching up to fence three with a measuring tape, plotting my approach while the rest of the track was still a blur. Now I get it. By walking the whole thing through first, you find out where the venue has hidden its surprises, and you don't waste emotional energy on questions that don't really matter. The terrain tells you where to spend attention.

Footing, grass, and what the ground is telling you

The paddocks out at Boneo, and at a lot of the places we compete in Victoria, are deceptively tricky. The grass looks flat and inviting from the warm-up, but once you're out on course you find the dips, the worn patches by the rails, the bits where summer sun has turned the ground into something close to concrete. She got down on her haunches more than once, scrunching the turf between her fingers the way you'd test a steak on the barbie.

Her rule was simple: if the ground moves under your boot, your horse will feel that movement under his shoes. If it's rock hard, plan your lines as if every stride is on a slate roof. I watched her pace out distances on ground I would have assumed was uniform, only to find the footing changed every ten or fifteen metres. By the time she finished a section, she had a mental map of where to attack, where to settle, and where to take a pull.

We spent a chunk of time near the water complex, which has always felt like a bog of dread for me. She pointed out the entry slope, the bottom line, the slight camber that pushed you left if you didn't ride it. The way she described the water was almost technical, like reading a topographic map. I started seeing the course the way she saw it — not as a series of fences, but as a connected piece of terrain that asked the horse specific questions.

Choosing lines I wouldn't have picked alone

The most humbling part of the walk came at a long combination, a brush to a table to a skinny, that I'd already decided I'd jump on a particular line. It looked fine to me. She'd watched me point and nod, and she quietly suggested we try a different approach, one that came in from a wider angle and saved a stride going away.

I tried it on foot, counting out loud as I went, and she was right. The wider line was a fraction longer in distance but it set us up straighter for the next question, another combination on a related distance. Saving one stride at the first element had been costing me rhythm at the second. The maths was almost embarrassingly obvious once she pointed it out.

This happened twice more during the walk. She'd look at a fence I'd been planning to jump in a certain way, and offer a quieter, smarter option that took longer on paper but felt better under the hand. It's a bit like driving in Melbourne — the back streets might be slower in theory, but you arrive calmer and without white knuckles. That's what the right line on cross-country gives you. You arrive at the next fence with something left in the tank, for both you and the horse.

How she talked about her horse through the course

A thing I didn't expect was how often she referred back to her own horse during the walk. She'd point at a fence and say something like, "Mango would just lock onto this if I let him, so I'd half-halt earlier than I think I need to." Or she'd describe how he'd react to a downhill landing, the way his balance shifted, how he liked to be set up. The course walk wasn't abstract. Every question got answered twice: once with what the ground and fence were asking, and once with what her particular horse needed to hear.

It made me think about Archie in a different light. He's a fairly uncomplicated type, willing but not super clever, and I'd been treating him like a tool to get around the course rather than a partner with his own quirks. After listening to her, I went back over some of the fences in my head, picturing him landing, the way he leans a little left on a right-handed fence, and I started to plan differently. Not how I'd ride the fence, but how he'd like to be ridden.

This was probably the most important takeaway of the day, even more than the lines. The course belongs to the team, not the rider alone. If I'd walked the track on my own, I'd have walked it for me. Walking it for both of us was a fundamentally different exercise.

Walking the track with a group, not just for yourself

Walking with other riders changes the walk in ways I hadn't noticed before. When you're by yourself, it's easy to stick with your first instinct and not challenge your own thinking. When you're with five or six other people, you hear their questions, their doubts, their slightly daft ideas, and you start to see the course from angles you'd never have considered.

She encouraged us to talk through each fence as we went. Not in a chatty, distracted way, but properly — what's the question, what's the answer, what would your horse do here. The rider next to me had a mare who was hot and quirky, and her concerns were completely different from mine. We both ended up planning slightly different routes through the same combination, both valid, both better than what either of us had come up with alone.

There's also something grounding about walking with others. You stop being inside your own head, where the nerves and second-guessing live, and you start treating the walk like the practical exercise it's meant to be. I left the group walk feeling clearer than I usually do after a solo one. It's a small thing, but I'd never really registered it before.

The Australian climate as part of the plan

One of the things she kept coming back to was how Australian eventing differs from the European tracks she'd spent years competing on. Over there, the ground is often deeper, the grass richer, the courses technically massive in a way that feels permanent. Here, our courses are usually smaller in extent, but the conditions are harsher. Boneo in January, Sydney in February, Adelaide in autumn when the wind picks up — they all ask something different of the horse.

She talked about riding for footing, not for fences, in a heatwave. She talked about how a CCI at Adelaide, with its exposed sections and the breeze that comes off the hills, can be more about managing the horse's recovery between combinations than about jumping cleanly. She talked about the kind of cross-country where the rider who wins is the one who finishes with the most horse left in front of them.

Walking the course, she suggested, should include walking it for climate. Where's the shade? Where does the breeze sit? Where will the ground be slippery if we get a southerly change at lunchtime? These are questions I'd never even thought to ask. I'd been treating the course as a fixed object, when really it shifts and changes with the weather and the time of day.

Putting it all together at home

The drive home from Boneo took about an hour, and I spent most of it scribbling in my notebook rather than listening to the radio. By the time I got back to the property, I had a list of small changes to make to how I prepare for a comp. Walk the whole course first, not just the tricky fences. Get down on the ground and check the footing. Plan the lines for the horse, not for my ego. Think about the weather, the time of day, the part of the track where the breeze will help or hinder.

What stuck with me most, though, was the change in how I think about course walking. It's not the bit you do when you've already done everything else. It's the bit that shapes everything else. If you walk well, you school with more purpose. If you walk for the horse, you ride with more empathy. If you walk for the conditions, you turn up at the start box with a plan that fits the day rather than the plan you made at home three weeks ago.

I've got another CCI coming up in a few months, down at the park in Sydney, and I'll be giving myself a full day for the course walk this time. I'll pack better, take the long way around first, and keep an eye on what the sky is doing. Archie will get his brekkie at the usual time, and I'll get there early enough to sit in the float park with a takeaway coffee and let the course speak before I start asking questions. That's the lesson, really. The five-star rider wasn't there to give me secrets about jumping solid fences. She was there to remind me that the walking is part of the riding. It always was.