It’s 7 a.m. I’m sitting in the rotunda at Gladstone, still in the morning cool, and I’m thinking about the past.
It’s easy in the High Performance world, even as shallow as I’ve waded in, to get caught up in the details. The footing, the drainage in the stalls, the want of outlets for fans and fridges. Ride times and selection processes. The parking.
I still can’t set foot in this building, this place where our equestrian forebears made ordinary horses into legends, without getting a little chill down my spine. This is the Holy Land. And yeah, it could use a little modernization. But when I see the plaques on the wall from Aachen, Rotterdam, Olympia, the photos of Majors and Captains and their cavalry horses who did double-duty, setting the stage for our modern competition horses, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the nostalgia and forget, at least for a moment, about the task at hand.
I had a lucky trip here, of sorts. I was supposed to judge a schooling show at the Quantico Marine Base, something I did last year and LOVED, and I was looking forward to repeating the experience. I’d planned on sticking the horses in paddocks while I judged the show, and then going onward to Gladstone from there.
But just as I rounded the corner to get on the freeway heading east towards Quantico, the show manager called to tell me that with the rain we’d been getting all night and were due to get all day, they’d decided to cancel the show—just in time for me to instead take the freeway west towards Gladstone. Perfect timing! I’m hoping they’ll reschedule the show, and as much as it was, I’m sure, an epic pain in the patoot for them, we desperately needed the rain.
So off to Gladstone we went through some considerable storms. It took me a little longer than expected, but both the Red Hots travelled well, and the rain stopped in time for me to school Ella. The rain did make the footing here quite boggy, and with the indoor arena still undergoing renovations, they’d moved the clinic to Michael Barisone’s incredible facility, only about half an hour away; as such, I had the ring to myself, and it had dried up considerably by the time I set foot on it.
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She was, to my pleasure and surprise, very respectable. She’s tight, for sure, but she’d had Friday off, and she’d spent nearly six hours on a trailer, so I can’t complain at all. I just worked on moving her back around, nothing special, though I did make a nice line of ones and some good-enough piaffe-passage, just to get her thinking about it. I find that if I work her too fluffily after a day off, she doesn’t bring her work ethic to the next day’s session.
I was just going to hack Midge around, but Debbie and Maureen Pethick, superstar coordinator here at Gladstone, wanted to see a horse go around on the footing after the grounds staff worked on it—after last year’s monsoons, and with the new footing installation, everyone wants to have a plan on how to maintain it best for the Championships.
So Midge played crash-test-dummy, just cruising around to see how the footing reacted to a horse. I thought it was perfectly fine stuff—it’s sand with shreds of a felt-like material (and, I’m sure, more stuff) mixed in, and while it sounds flat and a little loud to ride on, it’s a nice surface. The most impressive thing, though, is the maintenance crew—they’ve got two or three different gizmos to fluff and flatten, as necessary, plus drains in the base that are almost too efficient, and big water-cannon sprinklers for maximum watering efficiency. I think we are in for a treat at the Festival.
Today I’ll ride Midge during the lunch break—he’s not part of the clinic, just along for the ride up to Lendon’s, though I’m grateful for the opportunity to school him in this ring as many times as possible before his demo here next month. (As you may have gathered, he is not the most courageous creature on the planet.)
Ella’s lesson is this afternoon. Everyone will take off for the night but me—I’m taking an extra half-day to school Ella one more time here tomorrow morning, and then we’ll head off to Lendon’s. I’m so happy to catch up with my New England friends, but I must confess that I’m looking forward to having a few hours of quiet just to absorb this place.
