CDEs (which is not indoor driving), consist of 3 phase, like eventing. Dressage, marathon and cones. Like eventing, the big events go over 4 days with days 1/2 for dressage, day 3 marathon and the last day is cones.
Dressage is in a larger arena than ridden dressage and the letters are identical. I believe everyone is in an 40x80m arena now. The singles have been using it for several years but teams and pairs held on to the big 40x100 ring while drivers and the FEI negotiated the fine details of the test. Like eventing, the score is penalty based, but that’s where the similarities end. The dressage penalty score is not a true inverse, it has a coefficient applied, so a high 40 is a low 70% The judges are also deathly allergic to good scores. I’ve watched 200 ponies for in the world championship and mid 70 percentile won, so if it looks good and gets that kind of score, everyone is celebrating back at the barn!
At the lower levels it’s ok to use one carriage at all levels so many of those drivers will use their marathon carriage in all 3 phases. At intermediate it’s permissable but usually not done. At advanced it’s not permitted, you must use a presentation carriage and the wheel width can’t be less than 138cm wide for singles (wider for horse teams/pairs), so ALL of them are minimum width and not wider (when we get to cones day this will make sense).
At the highest level singles have to do collected, working and extended trot and canter, extended walk, shoulder in, rein backs and halts. There’s no cantering in dressage in pairs and teams, but they have some ones handed driving that takes my breath away
Marathon is why we do this sport. It’s very complicated so trust me, that what follows is a summary: the course is really 2 components. First is the overall track which is typically about 8-12km overall with shorter tracks for lower levels. It has a target or optimum time with a 3min window, too fast, too slow, HUGE penalties. The person on the back is in charge of managing that. The course will have km markers for each of the divisions that have their own track and depending on the levels and whether it’s a horse or a pony, they have their own target kph. We also have a program which calculated all this out.
Then within the track there will be up to 8 “obstacles”. Each obstacle has it’s own timer, usually you enter/exit through one timer but not always. This is where speed and strategy matters. Within the obstacle, which is usually pretty solid, there will be up to 6 gates lettered A through F, with a red letter and a white one. YOU MUST GO THROUGH THEM SEQUENTIALLY, with red on right, white on left. You cannot go through a higher letter to get to another, meaning if the direct path to A required you to cross the plane of B, you better find another way because it’s an elimination if you do. However, once you have gone through A properly, it’s considered “dead” and you can go through a dead gate as many times as you want (backwards and forward). The highest level does all the gates, lower levels do fewer gates. A good course designer generally managed to make A thru D inviting for training/prelim because all the easy/intuitive paths require you to go through E or F, but those gates only matter if you are doing intermediate (up to E) or the advanced levels (all gates).
In Marathon, we use a highly specialized carriage. This carriage is designed to go fast and be very stable on turns. My carriage has brembo brakes, which are Porsche brakes. It has a turntable/ fifth wheel brake and rear brakes. Most of the really top level drivers also have front brakes. You can have a feature known as delayed steering, and that comes on both the presentation and the marathon carriages. You can have something called telescoping tips which allow the shafts to compress as the horse turns into them and you can have a fairly sophisticated level of suspension. Mine has coil over airbag with leaf springs. You also have protection over the front wheels that’s designed to protect them when you crash into a post. Because leaving paint behind is just how it goes. Everybody chunks up against them at some point on course. The only exception is if there is a ball on any portion of the obstacle, when you knock that ball off the post, that’s two penalty points, so you do like to avoid those.
Each obstacle is timed and assigned penalty points with the lowest amount of penalty points going to the fastest time which means unlike eventing you cannot finish on your dressage score. You will always have the largest amount of penalty points in the marathon phase.
The final phase is cones. This is designed to ask similar questions as show jumping. You have a course of cones numbered to 20, although there’s a lot more than that because we have ABCD elements (zig zag and waves) and oxers which are four cones set apart and is considered a single element. The cones also have balls on them and each ball knocked down in an element counts for three penalty points. The only good news here is that if you knock down two balls in an oxer it’s still just three penalty points. But you can incur 12 penalty points in those ABCD elements. This phase also has an optimum time so as long as you don’t knock balls down and you stay under the minimum time you are considered double clear. Ties are broken by dressage score if somebody ends up tied in final score, but that is virtually unheard of because of Marathon having so many penalty points. Also, the optimum time is just brutal at the advanced levels, the ponies have to go faster than the horses because it’s considered they they can take tighter lines, but that’s not always true. It’s actually a point of discussion in the sport now that the courses are getting so complicated and the turns are so tight and the time and the speed are so difficult to meet, that people are concerned about carriages flipping. And that’s because at the higher levels you must use that presentation carriage. It has some consideration for these kind of turns but it’s not built anything like a marathon carriage and it will tip over much easier than the other carriage. And the reason why everybody is focused on minimum width is because once you get to the advance levels, the width between each cone is what’s referred to as fixed. Advanced single ponies go at 160 cm with 155 permitted for a certain number of cones. These are called skinnies. You can have a carriage wider than 138 cm. There’s no rule against it. But that skinny is still going to be 155 cm and it’s an extraordinarily narrow margin of error to navigate at speed. Again at world championships I’ve seen them have no double clears. It’s not unusual for somebody to win on six penalty points in cones. For the lower levels that are done under usef or ads, they have a prescribed additional width based on your wheel measurement. So if your prelim and your Marathon carriage is 127 cm wide at the rear wheels, the course will be set to 127 cm plus x more centimeters wide. And not surprisingly it’s much wider at the lower levels and the cones get narrower and the speed goes up as you go up in levels.
At the end of it all, lowest penalty points wins, but the good thing about this sport is it is incredibly data driven and you have so many opportunities to compare your performance to your competitors and people in other divisions. We are required to have at least three and typically at the FEI level have five judges, most who are foreign, so we get three to five dressage sheets per show and each obstacle is shown on the score sheet so you can see exactly how you’re doing against somebody else who did just as many gate s as you did.
Also, it’s more fun than legally allowed. My only regret is that I didn’t start it 10 years sooner.
This is the marathon carriage, and you can’t tell it, but my navigator (gator) is on the back, but she’s tucked up practically under my armpit and over the axle, because her main job is keeping the wheels down as I whip around that post on my left
This is a presentation carriage
