He's a real boy!

Pinocchio has been on my mind a lot today. But not for any of the obvious reasons unless you've read the title of this post. In which case it is probably very obvious.
After the day off and the hack day that Apollo was allowed after Maryland II we went into dressage boot camp.
A recurring  theme in Apollo's dressage work has been that he is too strong in the left rein with hardly any contact in the right creating (or maybe it's resulting from) a crooked horse. Well the problem with that is that you can't push impulsion through a crooked horse. It just doesn't work (oh and impulsion is the desire to move forward for those of you that don't know). If you happen to be either A) a pony clubber or B) a dressage queen then you know you pretty much can't do diddly-squat unless your horse is straight and forward.
Well a magical thing happened, and her name is Holly Hudspeth. Since she's been back riding for a full half of a week now I thought it was time that she put her fear aside, cowboy-ed up and attempted to ride my horse (Holly and world, if for some reason you are reading this, I am 100% joking. All I had to do was mention her getting on Apollo and she jumped at the chance to fix my lovely thoroughbred with her magic but is too modest to say so)
After watching her work her voodoo on my unsuspecting pony I got to get on the next day and see how much voodoo juice was left in the poor sucker. And let me tell you, there was plenty. So much so that all my bad habits could do were attempt to dent the straightness Holly had instilled in Apollo. Suddenly I went from kicking a brick and air around the ring to actually riding a dressage horse. There was like, an actual neck there!
And so is the story of how a cross country machine learned the subtle art of dressage and they all lived happily ever after.
Just kidding about the happily ever after, I can guarantee that we are going to have some more arguments in the future. But right I'm just happy that Apollo is my very own Pinocchio, a real [dressage] boy at last!!