My horse retired, so I took up rugby

Okay, there were quite a few steps in between, but that is essentially how we got here.

So let's take it back to the start. I've been riding since I was seven and I got Sam when I was 17. For most of my life, being a horse rider was part of who I was. I was a horse girl through and through, and I didn't really need to think about it as an identity because it shaped so much of my life anyway. Even after I stopped competing, I was still riding three or four times a week and spending a significant amount of my time at the yard.

I'd actually been planning to start competing again. Sam was getting older, but he was still going well and I thought we'd have another go at it while we could. Unfortunately, before we got the chance, he tore a tendon in his leg, which changed everything.

For a while, retirement wasn't even what I was worried about. We didn't know whether he was going to recover well enough to have a decent quality of life, and there were conversations about what would happen if he didn't start improving. After having him for so long, the possibility that I might actually lose him in such a way was unthinkable.

Thankfully, he did improve and recovered well enough to retire. More than three years later, he's still happily retired and absolutely loves spending his days out in the field, which, to be fair, is his idea of the perfect life anyway.

Once the immediate relief of knowing he was going to be okay settled down, I had to figure out what my life looked like without riding being such a big part of my week. There was definitely an identity crisis in there too. I'd been riding since childhood and had built Strong in the Saddle around my work as a PT specialising in fitness for horse riders, but now I wasn't actually getting on a horse myself.

Logically, that didn't remove anything I knew. I hadn't forgotten how to ride, and I certainly hadn't forgotten everything I knew about training, strength and biomechanics because my horse retired. But it still left me feeling slightly like an imposter. I was trying to build a business helping other riders with their fitness while wondering how I could do that when I wasn't even riding myself.

There was also a fairly sizeable hole left in my life. I'd spent years organising several days of every week around Sam and the yard, and suddenly I had all of that time with no real idea what I was going to do with it.

Rugby, as it turned out, was already starting to creep into that space.

Knowing rugby and playing rugby are apparently very different things

I'd actually started playing tag rugby before Sam retired. A friend of mine played and had asked me to come along and sub for her team a couple of times, and I really enjoyed it.

I'd also been a massive rugby fan since I was a child. I'd watched countless matches, gone to games and knew the sport inside out, so I went into tag with a fairly good idea of where I should be and what was supposed to be happening.

The slight problem was that knowing what you're supposed to do and actually being able to do it are two very different things.

I hadn't played a ball sport for years, and it turns out watching a lot of rugby doesn't magically give you the ability to catch or pass a rugby ball. I eventually joined a tag team, but if I'm being honest, I wasn't particularly good. If I'm being brutally honest, I was mostly useful because they needed the numbers.

I kept turning up though, and once I wasn't riding anymore, having somewhere to go and play on a Thursday gave me another sport to focus on. I got better, slowly, and more importantly I enjoyed it.

Then someone joined our tag team who played rugby for Clontarf. They were setting up a second team at the time and looking for new players, so she asked if I'd ever considered playing 15s and invited me to come along and give it a go.

It wasn't something I'd really considered before. I loved rugby and I was enjoying tag, but I'd only just started getting to grips with the basic skills without having someone ready to flatten me at the first opportunity. Contact rugby felt like quite a leap, but I agreed to go along and try it.

And that was how I ended up at my first contact rugby training session..

Turns out contact rugby involves quite a lot of contact

My first match came only a couple of weeks after I started training. I was on the bench, came on at some point and remember trying to tackle someone who basically pushed me out of the way. After that, I mostly wanted to stay as far away from everything as possible.

Basically, for those first few games, I was terrified. I didn't want the ball because I didn't want someone to tackle me, and when I did get it, there were some truly terrible panic offloads because my main priority was getting rid of it before anyone got near me. Defending wasn't much better. Someone running directly at me meant having to make a very quick decision about whether I was actually going to tackle them, when every instinct I had was telling me to get out of the way.

What I found really strange was how little all those years of watching rugby seemed to help once I was actually standing on the pitch. I understood the game, knew the rules and could see what players were supposed to be doing, but putting any of that into practice while everything was happening around me at full speed was completely different.

Horse riding hadn't exactly made me afraid of getting hurt. I'd spent half my life arguing with half a tonne of animal for fun, so risk wasn't exactly a new concept. The difference was that riding had taught me to do everything possible to stay balanced and avoid hitting the ground. Now I was learning a sport where I had to deliberately run towards another person and accept that hitting the ground was probably going to be part of it.

It took a while for my brain to catch up. I'm not even fully certain it has caught up yet, and I've been playing rugby for nearly two years now.

You’re a winger, Chrissy

When I started playing, I started on the wing. There is probably a nicer way of explaining why, but in my particular case I was new, fast and terrified of contact, so putting me somewhere I could hopefully do the least amount of damage made sense.

And actually, wing suited me while I was learning. There was less pressure, I had a bit more space and I could gradually get used to playing without needing to be involved in everything all the time. I played fullback a few times as well, mostly in ten-a-side cup games when we were short on numbers. Playing 15 in tens basically means covering the job of the fullback and the wingers, which is every bit as tiring as it sounds.

I don't think rugby ever really felt like some completely new thing I'd discovered because it had already been part of my life for years. I'd grown up watching it, going to matches and following the sport. Playing it was new, rugby itself wasn't.

The closest thing to a moment of commitment was probably paying my membership. Once I'd handed over the money, I was locked in. I guess I was a rugby player now.

Then I moved country. Twice.

When I decided to move to France, one of the things on my list was finding a rugby club. I was moving somewhere I didn't know anyone, so joining a team seemed like a fairly obvious way to meet people, and I figured playing with a French team wouldn't do my French any harm either.

The timing didn't quite work out. I arrived towards the end of the rugby season, and by the time the next one came around I'd already decided I wasn't going to stay in France, so I never actually joined a team there.

When I moved to Plymouth, I had pretty much the same plan: find a rugby club, keep playing and hopefully make some friends along the way. This time it worked better than I could have expected.

Joining Plymouth Albion has given me some of the best friends I've ever had. Rugby gave me a group of people I had something in common with from day one, which made moving somewhere new a lot easier. Those friendships quickly became about far more than seeing each other at training twice a week too. We go out, do things together outside the club and, somehow, Plymouth started feeling like home surprisingly quickly.

I'd already made good friends through rugby in Dublin, so I knew joining a team was a good way to meet people. What I probably didn't expect was just how much of a community I'd find through it. I joined Albion because I wanted to keep playing rugby and make friends in a new city, and that's exactly what happened, just probably more than I expected.

From the back three to playing 9

When I joined Albion, I played most of my games at fullback. I'd played the position a few times before, so I knew the role and had a reasonable idea of what I was supposed to be doing. The only slight flaw in this plan was that tackling was still probably the weakest part of my game, and that's not ideal when you're the last line of defence. After a while, the conversation started about moving me to scrum-half, which initially I assumed was because I'm short. I'm 5'2", everyone looks at me and thinks scrum-half, so it seemed like a reasonable conclusion.

Turns out there was slightly more thought behind it than that. Playing 9 requires you to understand what's happening around you and make decisions about where the ball needs to go next and, by this point, I could actually catch and pass the ball (On my left side at least.) I was happy to give it a go because I'd become much more comfortable on a rugby pitch by then and felt ready for a new challenge. I also liked the idea of being more involved in the middle of everything and having a completely different set of skills to work on.

At scrum-half, you're constantly tracking where the ball is going, working out the quickest line to the next breakdown and making sure you're there ready to play it when it comes out. That's probably been one of the biggest adjustments for me because it's completely different to how I'd previously had to think about moving around the pitch.

Defence has taken some getting used to as well. Every so often I'll get myself into what I think is a good defensive position, we'll win the ball back and I'll suddenly remember that I'm the 9 and everyone is waiting for me at the back of the ruck. Then I'm sprinting across the pitch to get there and play it.

I've also had to change some of my instincts around the breakdown. Previously, if I was close enough to help clear out, I'd get involved. Now I need to avoid getting sucked into the ruck because my job is to get the ball away from the back of it, and I can't do that if I'm in there myself. That's meant learning to think one step ahead about where I need to be rather than automatically doing what I would have done before.

Then there's actually learning the skills that come with playing 9. I'm left-handed, so passing off my left has always been much stronger, and I've had to put a lot of work into my right-hand pass. I've really enjoyed having specific things to practise though, along with working on my kicking, learning different options and getting better at reading what's happening around me.

The more I've played there, the more I've enjoyed it. I like being involved, I like having to think about what's happening around me and I like that there's still loads for me to learn. It also turns out I'm quite a mouthy little bitch, so perhaps I was always destined to be a scrum-half.

I'm still a horse rider

I still miss riding. A lot. I was at a horse show recently and all it did was make me want to get back on a horse. I do have friends whose horses I could potentially ride, but living in Plymouth with most of my riding gear still in Ireland makes it a little more complicated than deciding one morning that I'll pop up to the yard.

I don't see myself as someone who used to ride, though. I've been riding since I was seven and horses have been part of my life for far too long for that. I'm just not riding at the moment. I definitely want to get back to doing more of it when I can, and maybe there'll even be another horse at some point, but for now things are just a bit different.

It's funny to think rugby could have been part of my life much earlier too. I actually tried training when I was about 17, but there wasn't an under-18s team for me to join at the time, so it never went anywhere. Maybe if the opportunity had been there, I'd have started playing then. Maybe I'd have been really good by now. Or maybe I'd still be trying to convince myself not to run the other direction when a prop is coming my way. We'll never know.

What I do know is that I'm playing now. I'm heading into this season at scrum-half, I'm having fun and rugby has brought some brilliant people into my life in both Dublin and Plymouth. Sam is happily retired and I still miss riding, but rugby hasn't replaced that part of my life. It's just another sport I've ended up loving.

So no, my horse retiring didn't technically make me take up rugby. There were quite a few steps in between.

But it makes for a much better title.