Back to coming off the horse... we're focused on our new found trotting while bending. We're counter-bending while circling right. Challenging for me because my shoulders and hips never turn right to begin with and then when I'm asked to counter bend, I basically ask the horse to turn left. I'm also staring at his head, because duh how else would you confirm if he's counter-bending. Then I happen to look up and find that we're about 5m away from a cross rail. At a really screwy angle and pointed at the right hand standard of said cross rail. In my head I thought "well, he'll figure it out." In Yoshi's head he thought "well, this is a weird angle to jump from, but I think that's what she wants." And the poor soul tried to jump the cross rail from a terrible angle by the standard. He tripped over it and knocked the standard and rails. I sumersaulted over his right shoulder and landed on my feet, holding the reins, already apologizing to my honest, trier of a horse. He looked a little disturbed by this amount of stupidity coming from his rider, but settled back down pretty easily. After profuse apologizing and pets along with a good bit of laughing at myself, we went back to work.
When JT gave me a course she said "we're going to start over the crossrail ON PURPOSE." The rest of the lesson was actually fantastic. We did the one stride line of 4 jumps quite a few times with her making the 2nd through 4th cross rails bigger and bigger each time until they were set at the top of the standards. He was really rocking back, patting the ground, and JUMPING over each one. It felt SO COOL.
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| Watching the yearling filly who got loose cavort around in the distance |
ugh, whoops about the unintended (in every sense of the word) dismount!! that grid of 4 giant cross rails sounds awesome tho! i've been trying to brainstorm easy-but-effective grid set-ups to do without a ground crew and that might be exactly the ticket!
ReplyDeleteIt was a really great grid, I'm all about things that do the work for me!
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