My horses and I trundle along down here in Welly-world, making little nuggets of progress, and soaking it all in.

Ella is working beautifully. I love my relationship with this horse—we’re an old married couple now, and as such we have our little spats because we know how to push each other’s buttons, but I love her and she loves me and we know each other so well that we just move like one organism. That isn’t to say that we don’t have things to work on, because there’s always things to work on. But she’s so solid in who she is now, and I’m putting together work that feels like a finished product instead of a work in progress, and that’s a beautiful feeling.

If Ella is at the end of that journey with me, Danny is at the beginning, and it’s terribly exciting. Danny hasn’t always been the most straightforward of creatures (um, understatement of the century), with his twirl-first-ask-questions-later reaction time, his terribly athletic little body that can go every direction at once, and more than a hefty dose of cheek, he’s been an exciting ride.

But he’s working for me, not against me now. And because he was such a goon, he forced me to take my time on the foundation, which means that now, the work comes from a really solid place.

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I like the quiet moments at the shows. I like the mornings especially, when I come to feed Ella and clean her stall before heading out to the farm to work the rest of the horses. I like the stable compound before the masses descend, when it’s just quietly eating and breathing horses and a handful of riders or grooms going about their morning chores.

And while of course I don’t begrudge anyone for having a groom—I have help when I show too, and I don’t have a spouse or kids or a life who demand my attention in the morning—I like seeing Big Time riders doing their own morning or evening chores, laying their hands on their horses legs, checking in with their horse, their partner, their friend.

And I really like it when those Big Time riders stop by to chat, say hello, ask how my ride went. These folks don’t know me from Adam, and I’m nobody, but there’s a few in particular who always make a little time, and I find that lovely and gracious. We hear so often about the ugliness of high performance sport, the drugs and the double commissions and the highest of stakes. Little moments like that give me faith in it all again.

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I was making my list of goals for 2017, and on the list (along with “eat like an adult,” “sleep past 4 am” and “take a cooking class to improve my knife skills”) is to get a 7 or better on the canter half pass zig zag in a CDI Grand Prix. I understand the movement, I teach others how to ride the movement… and I myself, on Ella, can’t seem to ride the movement in the ring. I get the count right, I get 6 or 6.5, and it’s fine, it just can be so much better, and it really needs to be better, to get the scores I want.

I get a lesson on Ella almost every day, and I mentioned this to Michael in the middle of last week. He told me to go show him what I was doing. I did. And then he said, “You’re straightening on step 3, and that’s too early. It’s taking too long. Don’t straighten until step 5. Now go do it again.”

So I did. And it was lovely. And at the end, I stopped, dropped the reins, threw up my hands, and cried out: “I am SO DUMB!”

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December 1: It’s official! Nine horses will be going to Florida, to a brand-new barn that we’ll have all to ourselves. Awesome. I’ll bring down one working student—conveniently also named Lauren—and hire someone local to do stalls for us. It’ll be a lot of work, but it’ll be OK.

December 5: Well, now there are only seven stalls available. Thankfully, a farm just down the road has two available, so while it’s a bummer to have horses in two places, we’ll make it work.

December 10: Just kidding, it’s now 10 horses. Whatever, we’ll make it work.

December 20: Um, now it’s 11 horses. Way too much for one working student. PANIC.

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Danny is 8 this year. He’s always been wildly talented; I bought him in June of his 6-year-old year, by which time he could do big clean changes, a few half steps and a passagey trot that, while all will be handy one day, I had to basically sit down and take out of him because he’d learned a mechanism that wasn’t what I wanted at Grand Prix, one where he pushed his big powerful hind legs out behind and made them slow, instead of really sitting and being snappy. But more importantly, what I loved about him at 6 was that I could take a hold of the reins, clamp my legs on, pester him a bit with a stick, and not get dumped.

Well… mostly not get dumped.

The first time was about the whip. It was early fall of last year, and I’d been spending more time on the canter than on the trot because, at that time, the trot was more developed, and I wanted to make some progress on his weakness. I felt I had, that he’d plateaued a little bit, and I wanted to go back to the trot for a while to feel like I was making progress.

I was playing with the half steps, not even thinking about AND NOW WE PIAFFE but more just that I could compress and expand the trot in a really boring way, and he backed off and kicked out a bit, and I sat down and said hey, c’mon, and he double-barrel kicked out behind, ducked left, and plopped me on the ground.

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I’m terribly careful with my horses and their schedules. I’m a little bit of a nut about making sure they get down time, not just for their bodies, but also for their brains. They’re all individuals, of course, and some can handle more shows and more work than others. But in my time with Ella I’ve learned that while she’s a good girl and she’ll work hard for me, she’s at her best when she shows about once a month, and also only for a few months at a time.

I’ve also learned that she’s a nuisance in her down time—she stays polite for about five days, and then gets antsy, romping around in turnout, biting my staff, and then terribly lazy to ride. Average time I give her off? Two to three weeks. (That’s a lot of biting.)

But it’s worth it, because she’s so much better after her down time. She’s fresher through her body and looser through her back, but mostly she’s fresher in her mind. Ella’s at her best when she’s feisty.

Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse!