Roo Report — Katydid CDE 2026

photo: Sharon Packer

FEI 3* Horse Single | Loretta with Andy Marcoux

The 2026 winter combined driving season has been a good one, and in April we began our annual migration north back to New England. Of course, we had one more stop to make on the way home.

The Katydid CDE takes place every spring at the Tryon International Equestrian Center (TIEC) in Tryon, NC. Some love competing at TIEC, while others aren’t so crazy about it. Having hosted the World Equestrian Games in 2018, it’s an impressive facility — but our little group of combined drivers fills the place like a thimbleful of water in a 200-gallon trough. The stabling is solid, with large private locking tack rooms (totally worth the upgrade) and well-maintained rings for days.

After Live Oak International, there was a slightly longer gap before Katydid — more than the every-third-weekend rhythm we’d had all winter. Loretta got some recovery time, and her humans got to pack up six months of camper and barn life to haul north.

Thursday CT

A longer gap between competitions is good for rest, but can interrupt the competitive rhythm, so I decided to enter the CT as a warmup for the main Katydid event. I’m usually careful about not adding extra work to a competition weekend, but I wanted us back in GRR mode before Friday mattered.

Loretta came out feeling very ready to do something, though not necessarily the quiet, relaxed, organized thing I had in mind. She had her Retta Roo “game-on” energy, which led to a bit of rushing in dressage and a slightly more playful cones course than I was looking for. But then, that was the point of working out in the CT in the first place. Get those silly moments out of the system before it really counts.

All that said, we still had a great showing in the CT, coming out as the best of the three in the Open Advanced Single Horse Division.

Dressage

For Friday’s dressage test, we had clear goals: more relaxed, organized, and on point. Loretta was much more focused, so we felt good going in.

The whole test felt pretty good. The relaxation was real, we delivered our usual on-target accuracy that we’ve become known for, and her canter work was some of the best she’s done. All that said, the energy was a bit soft, so I felt like we gave away some points on impulsion.

Later in the afternoon, one of the judges stopped me unprompted. “Today was better,” he said, referring to Thursday’s test.

Did any of that equal a better score?

No.

Despite the fact that I felt the test was better, and at least one of the judges said the same, the numbers didn’t agree. Friday came in at 59.5% — a 2.3 point drop from Thursday’s 61.8% in the CT. Thus the paradox of dressage: there’s a gap between how the test looks and feels, and how it actually scores.

So we keep working. The homework is clear: relaxation with power, not instead of it. Loretta has both. The job is helping her bring them together at the same time.

Marathon

On to the fun stuff.

The marathon course was a good one — a solid mix of technical challenges and places where the horses could run. My main goal was simple: be clean. No touchy-touchy, no mistakes, no drama. Just a smart, confident, error-free go.

That plan felt even more sensible when two carriages in our division flipped in the same obstacle while we were still on course. That kind of action can put a chill down your spine, especially when you’re on course.

OB1 set the tone. It’s a brutally technical start — boxes and rails tightly spaced, with almost no opportunity to establish a rhythm. A tough way to start a marathon, but absolutely one of Loretta’s strong points. She loves to dig deep and turn, and she was brilliant. We won it.

A special nod to Marianna Padgett and Famtijn. Marianna was the queen of the middle section, winning obstacles 2 through 5 with Fam — a real statement of how far they’ve come together on marathon. Marianna and I have developed a fun friendly rivalry this season, with her leading on dressage and me on marathon. If that gap keeps closing, I’m going to have to work a little harder to keep her behind me!

OB6 was the one nobody liked. The infamous Tryon obstacle is tight, but manageable on its own — except gate E spanned nearly the full width of the obstacle right across the middle, with A and C on the far side and B and D on the entrance side. It effectively blocked every good route. We all had to choose our own version of a marginal one.

It actually drove better than expected, and turned out to be the most competitive obstacle of the day. Top honors went to Jacob Arnold with Jazandro, Marianna Padgett second with Famtijn, and us third — all separated by less than half a second.

OB7 was a different animal entirely. Big, open, long running lines in and out of water — not Loretta’s usual kind of game. And there was a decision to make at the exit: climb up and over a bridge, or take the low route through the water with more steering.

Tara and I talked it over beforehand and agreed to call it when we got there. If Loretta had the power, we’d go up and over. If not, we’d take the low road.

There was no question when we arrived.

She had GRR power to spare. She blasted up and over that bridge without a second thought. The no-touchy-touchy philosophy — staying clean, staying smart, never burning energy on a mistake — gave us just the edge we needed. We beat Padgett by 1.10 points and won the marathon phase for the second competition in a row.

GO RETTA ROO!!

Loretta is clever, quick, handy and honest. When the course rewards a horse who can think, listen and accelerate through technical challenges, she is very much in her element.

Cones

The cones course was designed by Henning Lemke, and it was genuinely fun and challenging, especially for the 3* Single Horses. While the course laid out in one configuration for all of the other divisions, Henning had a trick up his sleeve for our division.

They reversed the direction for cones 5, 8, 10 and 12. That sounds like a small adjustment, but it had a big impact. It turned a challenging course into a world-class one.

Walking the course, I managed to find routes measuring about 860 meters. Jacob came in closer to 750. Neither matched the official 700 meters posted. The course design wasn’t the issue — the course itself was excellent. It was a measuring problem, and I think that’s becoming a bigger issue in the sport.

For our round: I started carefully. Loretta’s “play day” on Thursday made me want to be sure we were on the same page to set the tone. Also, at Live Oak we dropped from 2nd to 5th because of an errant love tap on a number marker from a set of cones we had already driven. So my main focus was “No-Touchy-Touchy!”

You know it’s a fun course with smiles like that! (except for Retta’s “GRR Game Face”)

We drove a clean course, but that caution early in the course cost time, and we ended up 13 seconds over time allowed. It was good enough for second place on the cones phase behind Jacob’s double clear, but…

Here’s the math I had to make peace with afterward: if I had pushed just a little more forward, and finished the course just 4 seconds faster, we would have had a place on the podium!

Well, poo.

What’s Next

We finished 4th overall. Arnold won the weekend convincingly — his dressage is simply in a different zip code right now, and that’s what decided it. Berndl and Padgett both had strong weekends and are going to be real contenders for the U.S. team.

Loretta has proven that she belongs in contention as well by winning two marathons in a row against a really strong and improving field. The cool thing is, she’s got more in reserve on that end of things, as evidenced by her strong finish in a really big obstacle at Katydid. Her cones game is returning toward the clean rounds we used to turn in on a regular basis.

Obviously, we have to close the gap in dressage. That’s where the real work is, and it’s something she’s proven she’s capable of. We’ll target a return to Bromont International in June with our homework done.

In May I’m heading to the Netherlands and Germany — scouting potential bases of operation and spending time at two German competitions ahead of the selection results in July. It feels a little strange to plan for something before we know if we’re selected. But waiting until July to figure out what competing in Europe actually looks like would feel even stranger.

So that’s where we are: proud of Loretta, clear on the homework, and pointed at Munich.