No jumping tonight, just lots of exercise with poles.
Not to scale, obviously, but the diagram gives the idea. The "o's" are barrels for us to weave through at the trot, set far enough away from the wall that we have a track to ride straight along it. The "/s" are ground poles set at a trotting distance and the one with "x's" on either side is a caveletti, set at half-height. The "____s" on the right side are poles spaced for cantering.
So basically, we warmed up walking over, around, and through everything (wove around the barrels, wove around the trot poles, etc) then moved to trotting, then did some cantering on the rail. Discovered that when going to the right, Kieran wanted to cut off that bottom barrel (it was a tight turn to go around the barrel properly, but not quite a tight as it looks in my diagram) and then go on the inside track and skip the canter poles. Going the other way was no problem for him. I did manage to get a couple of nice rides going right and called it quits on that particular exercise.
We also did a lot of transitions, walk to trot, walk to canter, trot to halt, canter to trot, canter to walk...
And the nice thing about the ring set up that way was that I had a lot of options for things to do and could keep Kieran guessing. ;)
He gets the day off tomorrow (four days in a row of doing stuff is a lot for him!) and then we're doing a lesson on Thursday.
2 comments:
That looks like a good setup. What are your goals for Kieran?
Nothing major. We do trails (just for the fun of it and judged ones) and schooling shows. Lower level eventing sounds like it would be fun, too, as long as it's something he's into and we can do it safely (and so far he hasn't shown me that he can't or won't so mostly I have to make sure I'm doing it right. :) ).
I got him as kind of a blank slate, so just figuring out what he finds interesting is a fun experience.
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