Dressage Day by Day

Last weekend my saintly husband, horse, and pup loaded into the truck and trailer and we headed to the Cleveland area for a schooling show. Kristin Stein, trainer extraordinaire, was coaching other students at the show, so it was perfect. I would have coaching to get me through my first attempt at third level. We drove through 3 hours of rain and when we unloaded, the temperature had noticably dropped. It was about 45 degrees with intermittent drizzling rain. Horse shows always have miserable weather! This felt like the realy deal. Gadget warmed up nicely. Kristin was there to help me activate and "fluff" the canter. She had me give him little "love taps" with the whip to remind him to jump in the canter. We got a beautiful left flying change in the warm up as a result of her help with the canter. Trot work felt sticky in the warm-up. The test went well. His trot work felt really good. Even Kristin said his trot work in the test was much better than the warm

Here is a practice test of third level test 1 that I rode on April 27, 2013.  I then submitted the test for an online evaluation by Judge Natalie Lamping at horseshow.com. I was pleasantly surprised to get a 63.2% (which may be a bit generous in the spirit of a schooling show) from Judge Lamping. This test was before my "breakthrough" of collecting the canter the next weekend. She correctly notes that the canter still needs a good bit of work. However, our turn on haunches have improved dramatically from that year, which is great since they are a coefficient score! My right flying change received a 7, and if I can line up the left one to be clean, it is an even better change. See my scores and comments from Natalie Lamping below: Apr 27th, 2013 April Dressage Festival 2011 USEF Level 3 Dressage - Test 1 Judged by  Natalie Lamping Featuring  Lindsey S Score: 241/380 (63.29%) 2nd place Overall Rows Test Rows # Tests Score Coef Err Comments 1 A Ent