What a Double-Clear at Preliminary Really Taught Me About Patience

I'll never forget the feeling of standing in the truck afterwards, still wearing my cross-country colours, replaying the final seconds of the course in my head. Two clear rounds, no penalties, a result that had felt impossibly far away just a few months earlier. The funny thing is, the achievement itself wasn't what stayed with me. What lingered was the strange, quiet revelation that none of the speed or bravery or competitive fire I'd turned up with had carried me across that finish line. Patience had. The kind of patience that asks you to slow down when your instinct is to hurry, to breathe when your hands want to clamp, and to trust a training plan when you would much rather just get on with things.

It had been more than two years since I first moved my horse up to Preliminary level, and almost every event felt like a negotiation between the rider I wanted to be and the rider my horse needed me to be. That particular weekend, at a horse trials tucked into the hills about an hour out of Melbourne, the lessons I had been stubbornly resisting finally started to make sense. The double-clear wasn't a single moment of brilliance. It was the sum of every patient choice I'd made in the previous six months, including the choices I'd almost talked myself out of.

The quiet weeks of conditioning that no one sees

When people ask me what changed in the lead-up to my first clean Preliminary, I never know where to begin, because so much of it happened in ordinary moments that looked nothing like eventing. There were long, slow days on the arena floor, hacking through the trails that wind around the back blocks of properties around Ballarat, and a lot of sitting quietly on my horse while he grazed after work. I'd been treating every schooling session like a job interview, ticking off skills as if I were collecting evidence of progress. The shift came when I started letting some of those boxes sit unticked for a few weeks at a time.

Australian summers can be brutal on a fit eventer, and I learnt the hard way in my second season that charging through a conditioning programme in thirty-eight-degree heat ends badly for the horse's recovery and your own patience reserves. So my coach and I built the work in waves: harder days followed by easier hacks, plenty of trot sets along the creek lines, and absolutely no galloping if the mercury was still climbing at four o'clock. That kind of structured restraint felt maddening at the time, especially as I watched other riders posting faster updates from their own prep. But it gave my horse the kind of aerobic base that holds up across four minutes of cross-country, and it gave me the mental space to stop seeing every missed training day as a personal failure.

I also started paying more attention to his behaviour on the ground. He used to swing his quarters away when I tightened the girth, and I'd brace and rush the tacking-up process. Once I slowed the whole routine down, giving him a chance to yawn, lick, and settle before I even thought about mounting, the difference in his walk to the dressage arena was remarkable. None of this felt glamorous. None of it looked like progress on social media. But every small piece of patience in the weeks before the event set the tone for what we would need in the warm-up arenas.

Trusting the dressage score, even when it stings

The truth is, my dressage at that event was not my best work. We'd added a few new movements to the test during the winter, including a canter serpentine that my horse found genuinely difficult, and on the day we picked up a wrong lead in the second half. My score sat well above where I'd hoped, in the kind of territory where you start doing arithmetic in your head about whether a double-clear is even mathematically possible.

There is a particular kind of angst that comes with a less-than-perfect dressage score at an Australian Preliminary, because the marks at this level are tighter than at Novice and the field at events like the Melbourne International Three Day Event is full of combinations who ride the test with the kind of polished quiet that you only get from years of patient schooling. I used to spiral in those moments, plotting out how I'd need to ride the cross-country just to climb back into the placings, and that mental chatter always showed up in my jumping. What changed that day was a deliberate decision to put the scoreboard away and treat the dressage as exactly what it had been designed to be: a training tool. I'd been writing recently about how dressage tests help me become a better rider, and re-reading my own thoughts reminded me that the test is conversation, not judgment. So instead of riding the rest of the day like someone chasing a number, I rode it like someone simply trying to listen. That reframe, more than any technical fix, was what cleared the air for the next two phases.

Show jumping felt like holding a long exhale

Show jumping has never been my strongest phase, and at Preliminary the courses start demanding a different kind of ride. The rails are wider, the combinations are built with an obvious question about pace and adjustability, and the time allowed tightens enough that you can feel the clock sitting on your shoulder from the moment you cross the start line. My horse is careful to the point of being suspicious, which means my job is mostly to keep him confident and forward without ever rushing him at an obstacle.

I remember standing in the warm-up at that little Victorian event, watching the sun come sideways through the poplars, and trying very hard to remember to breathe. The lines I'd planned in the course walk felt abstract, the kind of thing that makes sense on paper but dissolves the moment you're cantering in on a fresh horse. Instead of trying to manufacture the round I wanted, I let each fence teach me how to ride the next one. If he chipped in early to the first oxer, I softened my hand and let him reorganise before the related distance. If he backed off the second element of a double, I half-halted, breathed, and gave him the time he'd asked for.

Looking back, I think that round was around fifty-eight seconds long, and I probably spent fifty-six of those seconds simply staying present. The rails stayed up. My horse finished the round looking for the next fence, which to me is the most beautiful sign that a horse feels good about his job. I jumped off and led him quietly in a wide circle, and I remember thinking that if the cross-country didn't go to plan, I would still consider the day a win. Patience had earned its keep in the sand arena before I'd even walked a single cross-country step.

Cross-country in Australian heat and going that refuses to behave

Cross-country at Preliminary is where the sport stops pretending it's polite. The questions start needing an answer in real time, the terrain demands a fitness base you cannot fake, and in Australia the going can turn a familiar course into an entirely different challenge between morning and afternoon. The ground at this particular event had been baked dry through November, so the course builder had added a few more frangible options than usual, and the water complex was running low after weeks without proper rain.

I had spent the previous week studying Devin Berglund's breakdowns of cross-country technique, partly because his explanations always make the technical stuff feel less intimidating, and partly because I wanted to walk my own course with the kind of intent that turns a printed map into a plan. That habit saved me at the third combination, where I'd instinctively planned to ride a sweeping five strides between two corners, and the watching walk showed me the ground on the landing side was deeper than it looked. I dropped in a quiet six, let my horse organise himself, and came out the other side with the canter I wanted.

The other thing that patience gave me out there was the ability to slow my breathing when things got hairy, particularly at the log into the water, where my horse put in one of his dramatic leaps of disbelief and I simply sat, softened my seat, and waited for him to land. Rushing that moment would have produced a refusal or a spin, and either would have been the end of the clean round. Instead, I gave him a heartbeat to process the splash, and then we continued. We crossed the finish flags with the clock still ticking kindly, and I let out a sound I'm not sure I'd ever made on a horse before. It was half laugh, half sob, and entirely involuntary.

What I carry with me now

I am not a naturally patient person. Anyone who has watched me pace around a float while a farrier works will tell you that. But eventing keeps teaching me, gently and repeatedly, that the horse in front of me does not care how eager I am to get to the next fence. He cares whether I can hold a steady rhythm when his adrenaline is high, whether I can wait one more second before applying the leg, whether I can leave a stride out somewhere else so I can add one in when it matters.

Since that double-clear, I have started measuring my season less in ribbons and more in moments of quiet competence. I have given myself permission to scratch a cross-country school if the footing looks wrong, even when the weather window feels small. I have let my coach add a new movement to our test even though it means another winter of patient repetition. I have also learnt that patience is not the same as passivity. It is the most active choice a rider can make, because every second of it is a decision not to interfere. The double-clear at Preliminary taught me that patience is not something you find at the end of a season. It is the engine that carries you there. It shows up in the quiet warm-up, the cold morning hack, the held breath at the second element of a double, and the long exhale as you walk out of the arena with a horse who still trusts you. I do not know when my next clear round will come, but I know exactly how I want to ride into it.

If you have been following along with the blog, you already know that I share the messy middle of eventing life here every week, the bits that don't make the highlight reel and the small wins that somehow matter more than the big ones. If you would like to keep walking this road with me, you can subscribe below, leave a note about your own patient moments out on course, or simply come back next week for another honest recap from the saddle.