thanks for the wonderful words of encouragement from everyone, and great ideas!

thought I'd let you know that I also worked with my instructor, Sandie Winrich,
in a lesson Friday night. She took one look at what I had initially sketched
out, and said, "too test like!!!" And we re-worked a lot of it.

I had some other notes on ideas of things to incorporate, and some notes from
doing a clinic with Terri Gallo last year near Omaha. (Terri's website
www.KlassicKur.com does a great job explaining a lot of things, and she does a
lot more depth at her clinics -- thanks to a USDF Region 4 adult Ed grant
helping make that clinic occurr.)

Interestingly, Walter Zetl's book is another source of some inspiration - - the
patterns that he talks about as training tools are not test like, and very good.

The lovely, lovely thing about the freestyles is the chance to showcase what you
do well, in a way that you CAN do it well. My horse has much better
lengthenings following a 10m trot circle - so that's in my freestyle! So much
goes into the choreography portion... its fun, but more time consuming than I
first thought it would be. Worth every minute though!

I'm going to try to put a first stab together for a local schooling show August
20th, and be ready to compete with it next year.

Anyone else working on one?? it would be great to hear more about it!!! ...I
think a great venue for a 'practice ride' of this would be at our horse fairs --
great to draw attention to our discipline!


Joann Messersmith

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you
didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away
from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.
Discover."
- Mark Twain



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