Time flies when you’re having fun!
It’s been that time of year. The weather has been almost universally spectacular, save for the storms of a few weeks ago that basically drowned South Carolina. I’m riding a ton, teaching a ton, ramping everyone up for this week’s Region 1 Finals, and realized that it had been three weeks since I’d put a blog out. Yipes!
Everything is great, just busy. The baby horses are all doing their thing, getting stronger, learning new stuff. Danny in particular went through a sort of wretched week where I started wondering whether he was going to be able to mentally handle showing in Florida as early as January, and then located his Big Boy Pants and has been phenomenal. He’s so absurdly talented that he can put together almost all of the Prix St. Georges, but it’s based on talent, not on training—the training is coming, and he’s getting stronger and more dependable and more consistent. I don’t have to decide now, of course, but at this point it’s waffling between doing the Developing Prix St. Georges tour, where he’ll be judged against his peers, and some open Prix St. Georges, where I will get creamed by vastly older and more experienced horses, but it’ll let him develop and learn and get strong and come out swinging at Developing PSG when he’s 9. Until I actually have to make that call, we soldier on.
Fender and Ella and I all FINALLY got up to a lesson with Michael a few weekends ago, and it was exactly what I needed. Fender had to be put on the back burner for me educationally, being a girl on a budget and needing to focus my training resources on Ella. But as a result, I didn’t have as good a plan for my test riding this summer, and I’m 100 percent sure it’s what kept us from getting to the Developing Prix St. Georges Championships in Illinois in August, where I’m sure we would have done well.
But two lessons with Michael last week on addressing the test were wildly, wildly helpful; doing so much riding on my own meant going off my feel, which can be a liar, instead of what it LOOKS like.
The lessons paid off in spades—we were annoyingly fourth to ride in a HUGE Prix St. Georges open finals class here at the Region 1 Finals in Lexington, Va., and led the day on 72.7 percent all the way until the end, where we got pipped by the last three to go in the class. Them’s the breaks! But a 72.7 percent and a ticket to the National Finals are nothing to sneeze at, and there’s still points to be had for Kentucky.
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Ella, of course, has been my focus, as we ramp up for all we want to do in 2016. As I mentioned in my post-Saugerties blog, I hadn’t been getting enough help on her either, and the fire in my belly that the CDI lit up hasn’t gone away. Michael was wonderfully helpful with her as well, of course, and she’s felt great at home, combining what we worked on in my lessons—poll more up, nose more out, being more still in my body and riding more like a rider and less like a young horse trainer—with conditioning sets on my beautiful front fields. Ella is trained, and mistakes in the execution of movements are on me, but fitness is an issue for her, so we start with three sets of trotting for three minutes, three times a week; then four minutes the following week; then five.
I should have started earlier to have her totally prepped for this show, but I had my eyes focused on Kentucky, which, with any luck, we’ll qualify for tonight and tomorrow in the Freestyle and Grand Prix, respectively. If I do my job, I know she’ll do hers!
The last piece of the puzzle was an incredible birthday gift from my best friend—a meeting with a sports psychologist. I’m an awfully good competitor, and a pretty mentally fit person in general, but I’m taking a big step up competitively next year, and I want to make sure I’m in good form to handle it.
I’ll write more about all I’m learning, because it’s fantastic stuff, but the theme of that first session was this: you are what you think. I’m the Queen of Self Deprecation, which can be funny, but can also be insidious, worming its way into my reptilian brain until it stops being a joke and starts being how I really think. So I’m trying it on for size. I’m sure everyone around me will just LOVE me when all I can talk about is how awesome I think I am, right?
(That was a joke.)
