We schooled last night; the first time I’ve ridden since JP schooled (the journey home on Monday took forever, by the time I got back to Oxfordshire I had no energy left to ride with).
It was interesting to watch JP with Vin on Sunday. He quickly established much more flexion and bend but with the same (light) amount of rein that I give Vin. However the left-rein canter issue… is still an issue.
‘I understand the problem’Â JP said, after they’d both worked in for a while. ‘He’s physically dominant to the point where his head is telling him he can only perform left lead canter with difficulty – which is what he does, even though he clearly can perform a very soft, flexed left lead canter without difficulty’.
Bless his little orange socks.
So the plan is that I have to increase our straight-line left lead canter work and introduce more collection and reduce our straight line speed (which he’ll probably accept without argument) and then bring those collected, soft, flexed straight lines gradually around and down to 20m circles.
Oh well, it’ll give me something to do over Christmas. 🙂
B.
Brennig this is totally OT but I can’t keep up with your prolific blogging. You’ll have to stop so I can catch up. Plus now in Google Reader I only get the first few lines. That builds an extra click into the blog reading experience!
tee hee
Well if I ever move to Britain I will know where to go for events. Are events harder in Britain than they are in America?
That depends. How difficult are they in the US?
Our Novice is the same standard as CCN*, 17-21 jumping efforts, very technical obstacles and a difficult to get mpm.
Moving down from there PreNovice is 3cm smaller and a slightly easier mpm, about 14-17 jumping efforts with the majority being technical.
Intro is another 2-3cm smaller and a little less tough on the mpm again. It usually has 14-17 jumping efforts with usually only 3-5 technical fences including corners and narrow constructions, the rest include water, hanging logs, ditches, coffins, trakehners, walls and galloping hedges.
Lis, we know about the google reader thing. The issue actually stems from Feedburner who have changed settings in their xml that makes Feedburner not backwards compatible any longer. So we’re having to upgrade our WordPress package which we plan on doing over the weekend. When that’s been done your google reader should revert to normal.
And I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Feedburner for being so completely wonderful. Not.
As for the prolific nature of life, the universe and everything… erm… 🙂
Bless him, he’s going to be so sick of cantering in circles by the end of christmas, good luck!