I tried to give young Vinnie some gentle showjump schooling this evening.<\/p>\n
The top arena is 20m x 60m (equirubber, fibre and sand) and a lovely surface to jump on.<\/p>\n
We schooled flatwork for 20 minutes and achieved a forward-going shape that was soft, supple, relaxed and just very lovely.<\/p>\n
I hopped off, put up a small ‘figure of eight’ course of four fences:<\/p>\n
* A crosspole with 80cm at the midpoint at ‘B’
\n* A single 90cm upright with colour fillers at ‘E’
\n* A narrow ‘stile’-type 90cm with brush fillers just before ‘X’
\n* A 90cm parallel with 1m spread and colour fillers just before ‘X’ on the rein-change.<\/p>\n
Nothing big, nothing scary, just schooling fences that could be ridden individually or as a course of four jumps – or even repeated\/changed as required.<\/p>\n
After our previous showjumping disasters I was slightly cautious at first; we approached the first – the crosspole – at a gentle trot, and I was slightly defensive in my position.<\/p>\n
Vin stayed as cool and calm on the approach as he had been during the flatwork schooling; we landed in canter, he still felt soft so I let him carry on.<\/p>\n
We cantered the track of four and I brought him back through trot to walk, patted his neck, told him he was brilliant and gave him a long rein for a lap of the arena.<\/p>\n
Then we came again; this time he was slightly stronger, marginally quicker but he still felt very good so I shortened the reins, shifted out of the defensive position in to a relaxed forward seat and kept quiet while he got on with the job.<\/p>\n
He was brilliant again! I gave him a rest and then we had one more go before calling it a day.<\/p>\n
As soon as he landed over the first fence he snatched the bit and bolted; we steamed around the arena at what felt like a hundred miles an hour.<\/p>\n
I had excellent steering but no brakes at all, I had to perch there until he’d run out of sufficient steam to permit me to guide him to a halt.<\/p>\n
There’s nothing physically wrong with Vin; he’s even had his back checked in the last week, he just flips out and goes back to being a racehorse – jumping everything very fast and very flat.<\/p>\n
I have to get the bugs out of his showjumping, this is very scary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I tried to give young Vinnie some gentle showjump schooling this evening. The top arena is 20m x 60m (equirubber, fibre and sand) and a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}