‘I lost nine stone so I could finally ride a winner’
Horse-mad Anna Hylands did not let weighing over 19 stone put her off from the eventual goal of point-to-point victory
Only one thing was stopping Anna Hylands from fulfilling her dream of riding a winner: the fact that she weighed 19st 7lb.
Now, having lost nine-and-a-half stone, the weight of an averagesized jockey, Hylands has won her first point-to-point race after six years of trying – and completing one of sport’s most remarkable feelgood stories.
“I climbed my Everest,” she says, although the truth is she was a winner the morning she woke up as an overweight sports journalism student in Plymouth and set about rectifying it.
Dartmoor born and bred, Hylands, 28, is a primary school teacher in the village of St Dominick near Saltash. After Hylands and her horse Nikki Steel won the novice riders’ race at Stafford Cross, an outpost of the West Country point-topoint circuit, on April 24 her pupils had a go at dressing up in silks.
Hylands does not let the grass grow under her feet these days; she radiates positivity and sees the entertaining side of everything.
She gets up at 5.10am, hits the gym in Saltash at 5.50am, spends 75 minutes on strength and cardio, and that is before her working day starts at school. On Saturdays she gets up at 5.15am to ride out her horse near Exeter.
But it has not always been this way. Whilst studying at Marjon University in Plymouth she started getting into racing and her Damascene moment came one morning.
“I literally woke up, thought ‘I need to do something about it [my weight]’ and rang a lady who runs a fit camp in Devon,” she recounts. “I told her I wanted to lose a lot of weight. I had a couple of friends who rode in point-to-points and I knew you had to be 12 stone with a saddle and kit.
“She listened and replied very matter of factly that if you want to do it, you have to do it yourself because no one else will do it for you.
“Dad knew I was going in plimsolls so bought me a pair of trainers. The first week was hell. I was aching from head to toe. I didn’t know what a burpee was and I wanted to quit but I made friends and gained in confidence.
“You have to like yourself because no one else will if you’re that big ... Racing’s not an easy place to be a bigger person.
“At fit club I was with a group of people who didn’t judge. When I arrived I could barely walk up and down the stairs.
“I changed my mindset about food and started seeing it as fuel. You can enjoy it but you don’t have to eat to excess all day. I had been eating at every opportunity. I cut out the carbs, potatoes and bread. I never really drank alcohol so cut that out completely although now I work with kids a gin and tonic slips down rather nicely in the evening!”
Her target was to get to 12 stone in 12 months. Her sister Louisa noticed after a month and was very supportive. “When I got to 12 stone I told her the plan and that I wanted to have a go at pointing. She was working for
Jimmy Frost at the time and asked Bryony [his daughter, the jockey] to sort out a horse. That was Louisa’s seal of approval.”
If the first seven stone came off relatively easily, she plateaued out at 12. She was there in June and wanted to get to 10 stone by October so spent the summer running around Dartmoor.
Hylands was already a good rider, accomplished in the show-ring and with regular hunting across Dartmoor on a strapping 17.2hands Irish draught.
When it came to finding a suitable mount for a point-to-point, Frost came up trumps with Railway Vic, a schoolmaster not much bigger than a pony.
“The next season I bought Ray Diamond, and was placed a lot but could never get my nose in front so I retired them both, went to Ireland and bought Annie’s Star,” Hylands says. “I was told she wasn’t very big but when she stepped off the lorry I asked where the rest of her was. She couldn’t see over a fence. She was barely 15 hands but she was class, the cleverest over a fence. No one told her she was little. She also gave me loads of placings and then I found Nikki Steel online.
“I went to try him, rode the horse up a mountain, got home and thought ‘what have I bought?’ He’s mental. He jumps right-handed and I can’t stop him but at Stafford Cross [in Devon] he led from start to finish.
“The weirdest feeling about winning was not so much the day but the next time I rode him a couple of weeks later. I had a little cry because it suddenly dawned on me I had nothing to prove anymore. It was really odd.
“Racing’s funny – it gives you this buzz. Until you’ve done it, it’s a weird fix, once you’ve felt it nothing else feels quite the same. But I can’t retire now until Nikki Steel retires.”
This year Hylands is getting married and she is trying not to buy another horse but with the online filtration at her school “not as good as it used to be” she is now able to monitor Goffs sales in her downtime which, she acknowledges, could be dangerous.
She also puts in shifts at her inlaw’s butchers shop in Saltash. Last Christmas she made 5,000 pigs in blankets with a thumb that she had dislocated riding a day earlier – the first person possibly ever to have to go to A&E after first churning out thousands of sausages wrapped in bacon.
She says she still has to be careful about what she eats. “The beauty,” she says, “is being in a sport where you are weighed every weekend – you can’t get too lackadaisical.”
At St Dominick, this week’s lesson is Agnodice, the first female midwife of Greek legend who disguised herself as a man to qualify as a physician.
“What a woman,” says Hylands. In her own way Hylands is an Agnodice for modern times, proving that anything is achievable if you want it badly enough.