I'd just taken Ella back to the stabling after our last freestyle of Florida 2016 and my phone beeped. It was a message from Thomas Bauer, who is a Big Deal Guy—he's part of show management not only for the Adequan Global Dressage Festival shows, but also organizer for some major European shows, and a member of the FEI Dressage Committee. He says he needs to speak to me.

And I have a middle-school flashback: what have I done? How much trouble am I about to be in? 

Being a dressage trainer in Northern Virginia means working with lots of riders with a jumping background, whether they're still actively participating in the hunters, jumpers, eventing or foxhunting, or transitioning from any of those disciplines into being a straight-up dressage rider.

Obviously good position for each of those disciplines is different, but they have a few things in common, and riders I teach coming from those disciplines are predictable in the equitation struggles they have to overcome.

Now that the winter season is nearing its end, I feel like I'm finally ready for it to start.

The best thing for me, as far as motivation and diligence is concerned, is to get my butt kicked. I never fight harder, focus better, or dig in deeper than when I've had my teeth kicked in, and man, did I get my teeth kicked in in January and February. Virtually everything that could go wrong did, including a few 0s and an elimination, a brief financial crisis, a family calamity, an Achilles tendon strain, and my boyfriend breaking up with me. 

Baby Hurricane will be the eighth horse to enter my life as a youngster and, barring calamity, stay with me until he's developed into whatever he'll finish up as—an FEI horse, we certainly hope. Of those eight, H and four more are still too young to know how good they'll be (Johnny, age 7 and third level-ish; Danny and Dorian, both age 8 and Prix St.

Hey everyone. Long time, no see. I've been radio-silent for a few weeks because nothing all that compelling has happened in the last few weeks. I ride, I teach, I work out in some capacity, I go home, I go to the shows, I make teensy increments of improvement, I repeat. 

But that doesn't mean I'm not learning. It's just that the wheels of progress were moving at a snail's pace. A plateau at worst, a tiny smudge of an upward grade at best. And that's how it goes, sometimes.