A difficult course can feel overwhelming before you ever walk through the in-gate. There are the technical lines, the combinations, the turns, the pace, the horse underneath you, and the pressure of trying to remember and execute everything at once.
For Ava Stearns, ASPCA Maclay National Champion, eight-time All-American at Auburn University, and now a sought-after commentator for top equitation events, one of the most useful ways to manage that pressure is to stop thinking about the course as one long task.
“The very best riders, the people who are coming out on top at these championships, are all finding moments in the course where they can reset themselves, reset their horse, reset their brain,” Stearns said on episode 483 of The Plaidcast.
She calls them pause moments.
Break the Course Into Pieces
Stearns learned to look for those moments early in her career. While riding with Missy Clark at North Run, she was taught to divide courses into sections rather than treating the whole track as one uninterrupted sequence.
“You would, you know, jumps one, two, three, take a pause moment. Four, five, six, this is your pause moment,” Stearns recalled.
That changed the way she read a course. Instead of thinking about every question at once, she could focus on one section, then regroup before moving into the next.
Tonya Johnston, mental skills coach and host of Inside Your Ride, describes a similar strategy as using checkpoints. The idea is simple: identify places where you can mentally reset so the course feels more manageable.
Pause Doesn’t Mean Stop Riding
A pause moment is not necessarily a place where nothing is happening. It might come after a line, through a turn, or in another section where the rider has enough mental space to check in. The goal is to take a breath, organize the horse, and make sure your brain has moved forward to what comes next.
At major equitation championships, that can be particularly important. Stearns pointed out that indoor rings can make complicated courses feel fast and crowded. “Sometimes, especially my first couple times at these championships, you feel like you’re ping-ponging off the walls,” she said.
Without a deliberate reset, one section can begin to run into the next. A rider who is still thinking about what just happened may already be late preparing for the next question. A less-than-perfect turn can become frustration. That frustration can carry into the next line. Suddenly, one small issue has turned into several.
Pause moments give riders an opportunity to interrupt that process. They create a point where the rider can come back to the present instead of mentally replaying the last fence. That can be useful whether the previous section went beautifully or not.
Johnston compares it to breaking any stressful task into smaller pieces. “If you have a task that feels really stressful or really overwhelming and you break it into bite-sized pieces, it’s so much more digestible,” she said.
In collegiate riding, she had to learn a new event on the flat, and her coach Jessica Braswell taught patterns in sections. “You do maneuvers one through three, this is your moment, reset,” Stearns explained. “It made it so much easier,” she said.
Breaking a course into sections can also make a difficult track feel more achievable before you ever enter the ring. Instead of asking yourself whether you can execute the entire championship course perfectly, you can focus on a much smaller question.
Can you ride this bending line the way you planned?
Can you get through this combination and then reset?
Can you arrive at the next section organized?
Johnston said riders are often surprised by how much confidence that creates. Once the course is divided into manageable pieces, each individual task starts to feel more familiar and achievable.
Find Your Moments Before You Ride
The best time to identify pause moments is before you enter the ring. Stearns recommends analyzing the course and deliberately deciding where those reset opportunities might be. That gives you a mental map in addition to your physical track. You know where the demanding sections are, but you also know where you plan to breathe and regroup.
Then move on to the next one.
To hear the full conversation with Ava Stearns and Tonya Johnston, listen to episode 483 of The Plaidcast. Subscribe and follow The Plaidcast on your favorite podcast platform for more conversations about riding, mindset, and performance.
