The Best Is the New Baseline

In August I wrote a little note here titled “Remember What You know.” Mainly that was about drilling down into the skills Loretta and I already had on board, and putting them to their best and highest use. You don’t get to that spot without, in the words of one of my coaches, “going through some rubble.”

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

This really sums up my expectations as we headed across the ocean to train and compete in The FEI Single Horse World Championships. I really didn’t know what to expect.

There was definitely a lot of noise from people about how things in Europe would be different, the competition would be stronger, everything would be harder. That said, there were very few specifics. There wasn’t really a great way to see a benchmark.

I was interested to notice that not a single person asked how I thought we’d stack up in the final results. I would have happily answered “I have no idea.”

The fact of the matter is, we’ve been training and competing in North America for all of Loretta’s life. That’s been our scale of comparison. We didn’t really have a scale for Europe other than the “it’s harder” comments.

The Best Was the Baseline

When we got to Steensel, Netherlands to work with my new coach, Kelly Bruder, one thing became clear. What I thought of as our best dressage work now needed to become our new baseline.

We’d spent the last year trying to “fix” our issues that were holding back those dressage scores. That view of our dressage “problems” was part of what was getting in our way of the solutions.

Coming to the Netherlands and working with Kelly had many advantages. Yes, Kelly has skills, experience, and accomplishments that I don’t, but she had one other advantage. A fresh set of eyes.

Sure, she did her homework before we showed up. She looked at our scores, watched some of our videos, and of course we talked about Loretta quite a bit. What she didn’t have was all the baggage that often comes along with seeing a fellow competitor from the sidelines over the years.

So when we got started, she went first to what was already working, and how we could build on it. There was good communication between Loretta and I, and of course she could see that Loretta is a very willing partner. Now she needed to focus that energy and shore up some of our fundamental skills.

She started by dampening the noise in our communication. My rein aids were noisy, still communicating with Loretta as if I were training a far less experienced horse. Quieting my hands helped Loretta get more quiet, and created space for us to move into.

Into that space Kelly helped us build some better definitions of contact, asking Loretta to more willingly yield before I followed. Then she began to refine our definitions of straightness. We had been exaggerating her bend beyond what our line of travel required. Straightening Loretta gave her more opportunity to engage from her hindquarters.

Those first couple of weeks were anything but quiet. I was figuring out how to operate on a new continent. I had shown up with an effectively broken carriage that needed to be fixed by mail order. All the while, Tara and I were figuring out how to get Loretta and all of our gear to France for a warmup competition in Chablis.

Honestly, the Chablis CDE felt almost like a respite rather than a planned training event. Having one event to focus on, combined with just how chill Chablis was, gave us a chance to stop and appreciate that we were in Europe, showing our little horse, preparing for something much bigger.

Read more about Chablis

When we got back to Steensel, the training picked up again, and Kelly introduced us to her own instructor, Camilla Sygall.

Enter the Dragon Master

Camilla Sygall is a British World Cup dressage rider based in the Netherlands. She coaches Kelly in both ridden and driven dressage. She also has several other driving students in the Netherlands who compete at the World Championship level. In fact, I’d be just one of 5 of her students in Munich (more on the International Team Dragon later.)

Camilla brought me back to proactive driving, and leveraged the fundamental skills Kelly and I had been working on. She got us to raise Loretta’s balance, lightening her forehand and driving from the hind quarters. Then she drilled down into something critical.

She rebuilt our warmup from the ground up. She helped us better define tempo, swing, and relaxation, opening Loretta’s stride and showing us another level of performance.

When Loretta is going well, she presents as a much bigger horse than her 15-hand measurement implies. After the first couple of sessions with Camilla, it felt like our small but mighty horse was every bit of 17 hands high. Tara and I were ecstatic!

That exposed a flaw in how we had been thinking about Loretta’s training. We had been working toward the level we thought she could reach. What Camilla showed us was that we had set that ceiling too low.

It’s Not The Destination…

Over the next month, we pretty much blissed out in dressage land in Steensel while every imaginable rolling contraption rolled by on the sidewalk like a Dr. Seuss parade. Loretta never paid much attention to the parade. Each day we worked, either on our own, or in lessons with Kelly or Camilla, Tara and I felt like we were accomplishing what we came to do (but didn’t know that’s why we were there.)

Kelly also gave me lessons with Flip, the horse she drove to silver and bronze medals at two World Championships. Driving a seasoned horse gave me a chance to feel some of the things we were trying to build in Loretta, especially the use of the outside rein and the setup for turns.

By then, something else had happened almost without me noticing. The World Championship had stopped feeling like the sole purpose of the trip. In fact, it had almost taken a back seat to where our focus and attention was. We were so enthralled in our training that the Championships almost felt like an interruption to our work rather than the final chapter.

This made one thing very clear. The 2026 World Championships would be far from the final chapter in this journey.

If you’ve been enjoying these Roo Reports and would like to help keep this adventure moving, we’d be grateful for your support.

— Andy & Retta Roo 🐴🇺🇸