Maeve Sheridan - “I found my brave pants in my 40s.”

In a recent episode of The Equitas Podcast, Physiotherapist, mum of two and eventer Maeve Sheridan talks to Sarah about qualifying for the Badminton Grassroots Championships, producing her own horse from scratch, and why she thinks eventing is far more forgiving than people assume.

Maeve talks through how she ended up at Badminton at all - a qualification path she describes as “by the skin of her teeth” at pretty much every stage, starting with a three-year-old horse, Pronto, bought largely on faith and right at the top of her budget.

They get into what actually got her there: a home fitness routine built around a working mother's real schedule rather than an ideal one, three separate coaches for three disciplines, and the kind of unglamorous consistency that doesn't make for a dramatic training montage but clearly did the job.

Sarah and Maeve talk through what the week itself was actually like - the nerves, the waiting around, and the cross-country round Maeve still calls one of the best of her life, vivid enough that she posted the full unedited video against her own advice and watched it take off.

They finish on what Maeve wants other riders to take from it — especially the ones who didn't grow up around horses, or didn't start competing until later in life — which mostly comes down to this: nobody at an event is judging you nearly as much as you think.

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