Designing Courses and Obstacles by Pamela Carruthers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book is a book on the principles of designing horse obstacle courses.
First, a disclaimer: Because of the subject matter, I can’t imagine too many people reading this.
Secondly, I don’t ride horses. I don’t watch sports. I picked up this book off the “free” books at a bookstore.
Nonetheless, this book is intriguing, with diagrams, and measurements and odd little bits of advice on what to do.
While small, this book covers 4 types of competition. All of them not only have to do with time (who can do it quickest) but more importantly, they deal with form. While you compete, you must keep the proper form. Rider and horse must perform with one understanding about how to maneuver and take instruction from one another.
For this reason, the courses must be designed to provide a challenge for the riders, but also be skill level appropriate. The challenge must be great enough that the competition fans out, with the poorer performers on the bottom and the top performers on top. You don’t want the majority of the riders to be clumped in one area. And you don’t want a trick course that doesn’t provide enough variety of challenge to favor riders who are not well rounded.
You also need to provide excitement for the audience and enough form tests (and good enough views) for the judges. The course must not be too stretched out, so as to be a gallop, nor do you want the course scrunched with many odd angles. In short, the course has take the group of competitors and blindly test their aspects to come up with the best formed pair.
The designers go so far as to talk about how to create the obstacles, what kind of construction to use, and what principles one should follow when examining jumps, so as to not be tricky and confuse the competitors. The jumps should be “attractive” (all the designers say this, although I’m not sure what they mean) yet the jumps should not be confusing as to where the dimensions lie.
Thus the art of course designing is formed through all these external constraints (and the official guidelines of the sport) so as to create the proper obscales… to test skill, not luck. Discipline and proper rigor — and not brute force. Consideration must be given at all times to the each kind of participant (competitor, judge, audience).
I suppose in all sports, the measure of competition is to see who can come out meeting the goals yet also fitting the rules best. What’s intriguing here, is that the competitors are half man, and half horse. A riding assemblage to territorialize the course as it is given.
