I’m in a showing lull, hooray, hoorah. Ella and some students are going to the PVDA Ride for Life next weekend, but other than that our next outing isn’t for weeks, and I’m VERY grateful for the downtime.

Downtime means focusing back on the training and not on the show work. Midge is really cookin’ along; I’m using Kyra’s piaffe-to-canter-pirouette exercise to great success, and I’ve expanded it into the canter half-pass, another weakness. I make walk half-pass, two little quick half-steps, then canter half-pass for a few strides until I feel his balance start to falter.

The result is a much slower canter half-pass than I’d actually want for competition, but he’s NOT on the muscle, so I’m comfortable with that. He actually did the whole canter tour of the PSG yesterday in that too collected canter, with almost no hand for balance. Yippee! He also made a VERY civilized line of twos yesterday, and I’m very excited about that; it means the I1 isn’t that far away.

Fender is finding a whole ‘nother gear, except when he’s not. When he’s not, he bears a striking resemblance to a turtle floundering around on his back, which, while not exactly “dressage,” is highly hilarious. I’m doing lots of body work, bending lines in canter, smaller circles and spirals, and hills, hills, hills. His butt is nice and burly; I’m waiting for the neck to catch up.

Ella had a much-deserved vacation the week after the show. Not a total vacation—I still rode her, and we did a few days of hacking (which does NOT relax her, but I make her do it anyway; I’m a meanie), followed by a few days of light, fluffy work—transitions between gaits, leg yields, work focusing on getting maximum reaction from minimum aid. When I put her back to work on Sunday, she was SUPER, light and forward and—most importantly—a lot happier in her brain. Yay.

This week I’m choreographing the freestyle Ella will be performing at the Ride for Life. R4L is put on by the Potomac Valley Dressage Association, and is a “real” dressage show, but also has a wonderful freestyle challenge on Saturday night. The whole show is a benefit for breast cancer research, and Cleo and I had so much fun participating last year, I wanted to come back and do it again.

Minor problem—Ella doesn’t yet have a musical freestyle. And the timing of her gaits are nowhere close to either Billy or Cleo, so I can’t recycle either of theirs. Enter Beth Hall of Woodwind Studios, who has graciously lent me a kür for the show. It doesn’t really fit her gaits either, but it’s a lovely piece of music, and we’re going to happily make it work.

The choreography has been up to me, so I’m taking a section each day and just playing with movements until I find something that works. When I get a new kür, I listen to it over and over and over again, until I’ve almost got it memorized. And then I think stuff up. I try and find phrases within the music that “sound” like a movement—building music is for extended gaits, quiet music is for piaffe, or a canter pirouette. I think we’ll put on a good show.

Last but not least, Scott will be coming down on Monday, so I’ll get some eyes on all the horses, and hopefully some guidance about where to go next. I’m really happy with where they all are, and I think I have good plans for how to get them to the next step, but it’s always nice to have an opinion from the ground.