BACK IN THE SADDLE
Gill Sherry
Shauni Dunlop grew up on a farm just outside Drongan in East Ayrshire. She admits she wasn’t particularly academic and had no intention of heading off to university. Why bother when she knew exactly what she wanted to do?
“I was always going to compete. The idea was I would continue competing with my own horses and work my way up the levels until eventually I would have my own event yard.”
Shauni began riding at a young age and was a confident and experienced rider. She worked for a while at an event yard, however, at the age of 18, she had a bad fall and broke her neck while riding at home.
“I fractured my C7 vertebrae. That set me back and I stopped riding for quite a long time.”
She was in a neck brace for three months. In addition, she suffered severe concussion as a result of the fall.
“I had a lot of physio,” she recalls, “and it took a lot of time for the headaches and things to stop, along with the neck pain.”
It was two years before she fully recovered but, as she explains, it could have been so much worse: “I was misdiagnosed so I walked about for a week with a broken neck. When I eventually went back to the GP, they sent me to hospital and I found out I was about a millimetre away from being paralysed.”
Understandably, it was a long time before Shauni felt able to ride again, from both a physical and psychological point of view.
“It was more fear than anything… what if I get back on and fall off again?”
It wasn’t until four or five years after the accident she felt confident enough to try again. Now, nine years
after last competing, she has won her first competition.
“It was at Morris Equestrian Centre near Kilmarnock. I was very fortunate. My own horses are young and they’re still very babyish… so my friend allowed me to take her pony – Jenka – and we won the class. I was really pleased.”
It was a major achievement for Shauni, particularly when she considers the other negative effects of her fall.
“After my accident I gained a lot of weight. I’d stopped riding completely and I’d got quite heavy so… I decided I was going to start getting a bit fitter. I found that I actually really enjoyed the gym which then brought me back to horse riding again.”
It also set her thinking about a possible business opportunity.
“The personal training market is really saturated,” she explains, “but there’s not a lot of people that understand the type of fitness requirements you need to ride horses… you need strength but you also need to be fit.”
As a result, she began offering personal training sessions specifically for horse riders.
“It doesn’t matter what your experience is. Whatever level you’re at riding horses, you have to be fit. Fitness and horse riding go hand in hand. It’s a good thing for anybody that rides horses to look at their fitness. It takes a toll on your body and you have to make sure you look after yourself, your health and your well-being. At lot of horse people generally just look after their horses and leave themselves behind.”
Shauni qualified earlier this year and now offers personal training out of Force Fitness in Ayr. And when she’s not doing that, she’s able to enjoy riding her own ponies, Basil and Cedric.
“I bought them as project horses,” she elaborates. “I’m going to be competing them this year.”
I’m sure you’ll join me and the rest of the AM team in wishing them the very best of luck!
You can contact Shauni via her Instagram account
@jumpstartfitnesswithsjd
