When my wrist stayed bare and the course taught me to feel the gallop

Archie had been coiled in his box all morning, a ball of muscle and twitchy ears waiting for the cross-country phase. We'd driven down to Melbourne a day early, the trailer loaded with hay nets, water buckets and a pair of stiff brushes. The early spring air was already warm and the grass around the lorry park smelled of damp earth and fresh cut. I had my boots on, my number bib pinned, my gloves tucked under one arm. What I did not have, as I stood in the queue to collect my cross-country sign-on sheet, was any way to tell the time.

It hit me halfway through a slow coffee. The watch - the cheap Casio I had worn at every event for the past two seasons - was sitting on the bedside table back in Canberra, still ticking its quiet seconds into thin air. There was no helpful friend with a spare. The gear tent had closed. For about thirty seconds I considered scratching the round, packing the mare and heading home in disgrace. Then I remembered that a watch is only one of many tools, and that I had spent the whole winter training my eyes and my legs, not my left wrist. So I walked the course one last time, slow and careful, and made a quiet promise to Archie that we would figure it out together.

A stupidly quiet morning before the flag

The day had started so neatly. I had laid out Archie's gear on the concrete floor of the float the night before, the same ritual I have used since Pony Club. Bridle polished, gloves laid flat, breastplate and the cross-country vest hanging in order. There was a thermos of tea, a sliced apple in a baggie, and a sandwich I would never actually get around to eating. I had even checked the tyres on the truck and the ramp on the trailer, because I have learned the hard way that a weekend lives or dies by these small, boring things.

By the time I noticed the empty wrist, the groom's tent at Boneo Park was already humming with competitors warming horses on the long arena. There was one lady near the secretaries' caravan with a chunky Garmin, two others tapping screens under an umbrella, and a teenage rider whose mum was squinting at her phone. The whole park had the buzzing feel only eventing produces - hay sweat, hoof grease, quiet dread. Borrowing a watch was possible in theory. In practice, asking felt like admitting I could not do my job. So I clenched my jaw, looked down at Archie, and decided that if a watch was going to save this round, then I needed to save it myself.

Deciding to ride anyway

I knew the course better than my watch knew me. I had walked it three times the day before, twice with my coach calling out angles in his Geelong accent, once alone with a notebook and pencil behind my ear. The four-star track at Boneo is kind, in the way Victorian countryside is kind, with rising grassy ground that looks bigger to a horse than it reads on paper. The fences were log and brush, with proper corners and a water complex early in the route. I had counted strides between combinations. I had memorised where the ground fell away and climbed back.

What I did not have was a number. The optimum time was printed on the back of my map, of course, along with the length of the course in metres and a tiny line telling me what average speed they expected. Average speed is a strange thing. It lives on a page and does not breathe. A horse does not gallop at average speed the way a car cruises along a freeway. He surges on the downhills, slows on the climbs, gathers himself before the trakehner and unwinds afterwards. I told myself, the way my coach always does, that pacing is a feeling, not a calculation. The watch would have helped. The legs would have to do the job.

Letting Archie tell me the rhythm in the warm-up

The warm-up arena sits uphill from the start box at Boneo, beneath a row of old red gums. Archie tossed his head when he saw the cross-country fences, the bright tops of the trakehner and the white boards of the brush oxers. He was already too forward for my liking when I picked up trot, the spring in his back rolling like a wave. I let him walk for a long five minutes, circling on a long rein until his chin softened, then asked for a working canter on the right rein. The clock I was missing lived somewhere else - in the cadence of his hooves, the swing of his ribs, the small huffs from the soft place below his throat.

A pace without a watch has a particular sound. Three beats, even, like a metronome that you cannot see but can somehow sense. When I sat down and asked him for more, the rhythm shortened and the steps grew bolder. When I half-halted, it stretched and softened. By the time I trotted him over the practice brush, I had a feel for the day's canter: bright but not frantic, balanced, with enough left for the second half. The flies were already gathering, and the warm-up shade was giving up to the first real heat of an Australian October. I wiped a handful of sweat from his neck, climbed out, and walked him quietly toward the start.

Letting the fences set the tempo for themselves

In the start box I said nothing, closed my fingers slowly and felt Archie settle. The starter called my number, the flag dropped, and we were away. The first three fences are uphill, a set of inviting logs that pull a horse onto his forehand if you let them. I let him climb, kept my weight back, and trusted the rhythm I had found in the warm-up. Over the top, the ground rolled forward into a long, descending stretch of sweet, thick pasture. This is where a horse can run faster than he should, and where a rider without a watch is suddenly glad to be without one. I sat deep, closed my fingers in tiny pulses, and let the ground itself brake us.

The water complex came at fence five, a black log set across a dark pond. Archie loves water in that guilty, splashing way some horses do. I felt him lunge for the drop and I had to take a real pull, sitting hard into the saddle, half-halting as if my life depended on it, which on a four-star cross-country round essentially it did. Then we were through, galloping up a steep bank, planning the next combination. I kept glancing left, the way you glance at a clock at work when you cannot be late. There was nothing there but a row of empty warm-up fences and a quiet judge writing in a book.

Halfway around the course I almost pulled up

Somewhere around fence nine I lost faith. It was the simplest of combinations - two upright brush oxers on a bending line into a hollow - and Archie came in strong, then looked at the second as if he had never seen it. I took a long, looping pull, brought him back, and felt his hindquarters drop underneath me. Then I panicked. Without the numbers I had no way of knowing whether I was crawling, and a slow clear round at four-star is a fast round the wrong way. I thought of the topline of the optimum time on the back of my map. I thought of the girls in the gear tent with their chunky watches. I thought of pulling up, schooling the next oxer, and starting again.

I did not pull up. What I did instead was count. I counted his strides between the hollow and the next fence, then the next three. From the course walk I knew the guideposts - a clump of wattles, a fallen branch I had marked with a ribbon, the patch of gravel where the tractor had been. Each was a checkpoint, the way you count the kilometre posts on the long straight road between Goulburn and Canberra. By the time I passed the halfway sign, three fences from the highest trakehner, I had stopped counting and started listening. His stride had settled into a long, swingy canter. His nose was out. I sat up, softened my hand, and let him take me to it.

Crossing the finish with nothing but a grin

The last third of the Boneo course is a sweeping arc back toward the finish line, past the members' bar, the parked floats, the clusters holding ponies and coffees. Archie was still on his job, ears flicking at each new flag. I had stopped thinking about time and started thinking about rhythm. We took the final brush oxer at a working canter, and I heard the announcer call my number and, somewhere behind the roar of the crowd, the small click of a stopwatch. I came past the finish flags, slowed to trot, gave Archie the most enormous pat I have ever given a horse, and cantered him all the way back to the lorry with tears in the back of my eyes.

When I walked back to the gear tent to check the times, the secretary looked up from her little window, raised an eyebrow, and slid the sheet across the counter. I had finished six seconds inside the optimum time, on a day when the going was heavy. I had done it without a glance at my wrist, without a friend shouting splits, without a Garmin buzzing at my elbow. I had used my eyes, my legs, my memory of the course walk and the metronome of Archie's canter. I bought a cold lemonade from the canteen, sat under the gum tree beside the lorry, and texted my coach: rode without a watch, felt every second of it.

What I now do before every cross-country run

You learn something in eventing the day you lose the tool you lean on most. The drill I now follow is small and simple, and it has changed how I ride every course, at home in the southern tablelands and away from Werribee to the Adelaide Hills. I keep a spare watch in the truck, sealed in a zip-lock bag in case of rain, or in case I leave the original at home. I walk the course with a stride-counting app open, taking rough splits so the body has something to lean on if the eyes and ears fail. I do at least one schooling session a fortnight without a watch so the muscle memory of pace stays sharp. I also talk to Archie in the warm-up, because he knows the rhythm before I do.

The watch is back on my wrist for every event these days. It has earned its place again. But the lesson of that strange Boneo weekend has stayed with me, lodged somewhere quieter than the gear bag. Pace is something you carry in your own body. Time is something the judges read off a printout. When the two line up, you feel it as a click, the same click you feel in dressage when a movement sits, or in show jumping when a stride meets its takeoff. Cross-country without a watch is not the bravest thing I have done on a horse. It is simply the day I learned that a watch tells you what your horse already knows, if you take the trouble to ask.