All the Poles Are Belong To Us

Man, do I have a lot of video for you!  So tonight, Jessica set up two sets of poles for us, one in two corners of the ring, kind of like so:

Basically, the idea was that we could trot a few times each direction over the top set, and change which end we trotted over so Kieran had to either go short or go long depending, but also the turn meant he couldn't just bull through them. Oh, bonus was that the top set started out with each side alternately raised. So like, the first one has the right end raised, the middle one had the left end raised, and the last one had the right end raised again. So he really had to pay attention to where he put his feet.




After he was doing that reliably, we moved down to the bottom set of poles. Here, they were all flat on the ground, but we were supposed to canter through them. We, uh...had a few issues.



Trying it from the other direction worked better and then we were able to come back around again and do it from the first direction.





That done successfully, now the poles are raised on one end similar to how we started. We trot through first so Kieran realizes they're raised and then we're supposed to canter through. It isn't pretty. (after a few repetitions of this, Jessica figures out the problem seems to be that we come into it fine but after we hit the first one something in my mind says "we're jumping!" and I start leaning forward and I kind of drop him and he just goes, "yeah, can't make that turn, I'm out!" Once I started thinking about sitting up straight through it and making a wall with my outside rein, we did much better.





Of course, you have to start all over when you change directions...



But we got it after a couple tries and then Jessica changed it from having just one side raise to basically making a series of teeny tiny crossrails. We did alright coming from the left but true to form with every other exercise tonight, it was more difficult going to the right so by the time we got this last time through, we were ready to tell Kieran what a good boy he was and call it a night, even though it wasn't perfect. (Plus! This was a lot of hard work! Both mentally and physically so we didn't want to push it too far either)



Of course, Kieran does actually like just getting to jump so as a reward for a job well done, I let him pop over this crossrail that was left set up on the other side of the ring. :)


Anyway, that's how our lesson went, the good, the bad, and the ugly, LOL. :) Even though we had some bobbles, I think it was a really good night and it was nice to go back and work on something a little different from what we'd been doing in previous lessons. I think Kieran thought so too as he was really pretty interested and forward tonight and even though everything was low, he didn't do the "I'm bored and just going to start knocking stuff over bleh" thing. I mean, yeah, we knocked stuff over, but not because it was boring! :)

Finally, there's a few screencaptures over here in this album if you want to check them out.