I wrote recently about some tips and tricks for GAIG/USDF Regional Championship preparation. I wrote good broad strokes advice, applicable to all levels of horse and human.

Where I find myself in my own championship preparation is facing the challenges of trying to peak a relatively young horse for his best performance, while also handling my own schedule of teaching lessons, traveling for clinics, and life generally getting in the way of my plans.

This summer I qualified my top horse, The Elvis Syndicate’s C. Cadeau, for the US Dressage Festival of Champions (Illinois) in the Intermediate I division. At 9, Cadeau is certainly still evolving in his education and his conditioning but not nearly as rapidly as he was as a younger horse. He’d been working on this level for more than a year, and because this championship was a Big Freaking Deal, it was my priority. I didn’t teach clinics in August so that I could be home, working my horse and working my plan. I had a calendar that planned our life weeks out, and while of course things came up, and it never actually goes perfectly according to the script, I’d built in contingencies.

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It’s regional championship season in American dressage land. For many, it’s the final (or semifinal, if they’re aspiring to attend the US Dressage Finals in Ohio) stop of a competitive year, and you have spent at least a few months practicing that championships test in order to qualify for it, so the fact that the big show is upon you (the championships kicked off over the weekend with the GAIG/USDF Region 2 Championships in Michigan) shouldn’t come as a total shock. But there’s always room for improvement.

Here are the things I’m thinking about as I guide my qualified horses and riders into our last hurrah of 2025.

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Lauren Sprieser just returned home to Virginia after a successful week at the U.S. Dressage Festival of Champions with C. Cadeau, a 9-year-old Danish Warmblood gelding (Blue Hors St. Schufro—C. Chanel, Richman) owned by the Elvis Syndicate LLC. A longtime blogger for the Chronicle, in 2023 Sprieser took readers through the experience of shopping for and buying “Cadeau” in Denmark. Now, she’s taking us through a week in her life—last week, to be specific—for the pair’s first trip to the Festival of Champions, where they finished as reserve champions Aug. 21 in the USEF Intermediaire I National Championship, behind Olympic silver medalist Sabine Schut-Kery and Jojoba De Massa.

Friday, Aug. 15

It’s 3 a.m., and I’m up and at ’em. We’re on night turnout most of the year, so I fetch Cadeau from his field. A notoriously slow and finicky eater, I give him an hour to finish his breakfast. But he’s already suspicious—being able to read a clock and all—and then I commit my first crime (of, I’m sure, many) of the week: I give him a dose of a gastric support paste. After spending half an hour acting like I’ve tried to poison him, he barely nibbles at his breakfast and then gives up to stare out the window at the trailer.

This will be a long day.

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The Virginia Horse Center in Lexington, Virginia, is a great gift of a venue for so many reasons: It’s super easy to get to, being at an intersection of two major highways; it’s in a proper town with a million hotels and restaurants and a cute downtown; and the board that runs it has poured resources into it, redoing the footing in nearly all of the arenas to international-grade surfaces for the English disciplines.

It’s also huge, which means that they have the ability to hold multiple different disciplines on the same weekend. Such is the Mid-Atlantic Dressage Festival and Lexington CDI3* (MADFest, for short), held in May alongside the Keswick Horse Show. International dressage, national dressage, hunters and jumpers, all together.

I freaking love it.

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Greetings from Virginia. My team, the horses and I are settled back in after a productive Florida season, and I’m ramping back into the mayhem of spring horse shows, teaching clinics and generally running all over the place at Mach 2 with my hair on fire. It’s not left time for … well, anything else, really, but certainly not for a lot of contemplation. But there’s also not been a lot to contemplate. I’m an ambitious rider trying to make the Big Time, but where I currently am on that path with the group of horses I have right now is a place that is well within my comfort zone. The boys are ages 6, 7 and 9, and I have done those years a LOT.

Even with all that mileage (and just ask my SI joint, because boy oh boy, has there been a lot of mileage), sometimes I still step back in awe of how cool dressage is, and how well the basic concepts of horse training work just about every single time. Horses are always teaching us something, and at the moment, mine are teaching me things I already know, all over again. Here’s a few of the “duh” realizations I’ve had in the past few weeks.

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A few weeks ago, a friend of mine took his young, promising FEI horse to a big indoor show—their first after a season of success in outdoor competition. The Grand Prix went well. But in the freestyle, his poor horse was overwhelmed by the environment and utterly lost the plot. My friend had to pilot a bomb around, so the score was a bit grim. A Facebook page I follow had posted about it, and with my heart in my throat, I clicked on the comments section.

To my both shock and delight, it wasn’t the train wreck I was expecting—far from it:

“What a great job he did, handling that unfortunate situation!”

“Bad luck but handled beautifully, and the horse will be better for it next time.”

“Special horse! Just needs time and experience.”

I was floored, because the timbre of conversation on the internet about animal welfare is not usually so compassionate toward the rider. There’s no doubt that all of us—in dressage, in horse sport writ large—have some reckoning to do, but there’s a loud and committed population online that seizes upon every opportunity to tell us that high performance sport is torture, that we’re all out there drugging and wailing upon our poor animals to make them move like the circus, and that true training should be done with nothing more than love and moonbeams, if done at all.

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My human is just … a lot. She means well, and she tries hard, but she has a lot of room for improvement.

Take, for example, her approach to my management this fall. I won two regional championships and one national championship for us, after which she (wisely) gave me a richly deserved vacation. But her idea of vacation and my idea of vacation are very different. I think vacation should be about doing your favorite things, which for me is hacking and stretching and running away with her. While she did allow for the hacking and the stretching, she also thinks vacation should include riding with the reins in one hand to continue to battle her tendency to pull. And that’s fine, except that then she expects me to respond to her efforts by actually listening to her seat and not running away, which is what causes her to pull, and that just seems like a very unreasonable expectation. (In fairness to her, I understand that she spent part of her three-day vacation this summer writing her book, so at least she’s consistently confused about what vacation means).

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So, I’m 40 now. It doesn’t look like I thought it would as a kid.

Some things are better than I’d dreamed. Some things are, in fact, worse. I thought I’d be further along in my life and my career, and I’m still dealing with that. But I’m prouder of unexpected things, and I’m less emotionally attached to some things I’d really thought would be important to me. And I imagine that, at 50, and at 60, and beyond, some of those things will become even more important, and some of those things will seem even sillier still.

But I’m 40 today, and coincidentally my business is turning 17 years old as well. Let me tell you some things I’ve learned, and some things I’m still learning.

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My last blog was about our triumphant 2024 Paris Paralympic Games for American dressage enthusiasts. Gold after gold, a brilliant week of consistent and extraordinary excellence. It was a contrast to the Olympic Games, where our team suffered the two most inconveniently timed hiccups ever, following a team selection process that required the throwing of a lot of Hail Marys. Isabell Werth aboard Wendy and Cathrine Ladrup-Dufour aboard Freestyle showed that green partnerships can achieve big results, but it wasn’t in the cards this year for the U.S.

Our 2021 Tokyo Olympic performance was stellar. Sabine Schut-Kery led the way aboard her homemade Sanceo, joining the rarified club of American riders who’ve placed fourth individually, and Adrienne Lyle with Salvino and Steffen Peters with Suppenkasper were on top form to collectively earn team silver. When the champagne flutes were put away and the confetti vacuumed up, did the conversation amongst those in power in U.S. dressage turn to the fact that Salvino was 14, Sanceo, 15, and Mopsie, 13?

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Out there on the interwebs this month were three Facebook posts that caught my eye. One was on a sales group for dressage horses, where someone called trainers to task: “What is it with trainers these days? Particularly in the USA,” she wrote. “How come no one is willing to put in the effort to help develop a good horse, and instead they just expect their clients to have the budgets to go and buy the finished product? I know there are a handful of good trainers that don’t get the recognition they deserve but it seems the majority aren’t willing to put the work in. Thoughts?” The replies were thoughtful, bringing a range of experiences to the table.

The second was from a Dressage-News.com article that quoted former team coach and Olympian Debbie McDonald saying, “I think we need more people able to bring along young horses with people who are willing to support them to do that.”

And the third was a Facebook post by six-time Olympian and former team coach Robert Dover, lamenting a lack of ownership support for international horses grown here in the U.S.

Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse!