Wow, a whole month....

I promise I've been riding more than that, I just kept forgetting to update. Anyway. Well. I have a truck now that's all my own. And a brand new trailer. So I'm hoping that soon I will be able to post, "we went to Hitchcock Woods!" or "we schooled over in Aiken!" or even, "we went to a show!". :) We'll see. Anyway, in the mean time, we had a lesson today. We've been working a lot on good, careful turns. So today, Jessica had a few jumps set up like so: 

 

The ones in the middle were two stride combinations. That is, the two parallel to each other were a straight two stride. And then you could go from the one on the right to the one catty-corner on a bending line with two strides.

Down in the corners, they were ground poles, one stride, low vertical, one stride, ground pole. Basically jumping on a bend so it took a lot of work to look ahead to where we were really going and not just thinking "look straight ahead!" because that wasn't really the case, LOL.

Kieran did pretty well. He did run out on the jump to the left once but it was pretty much because I wasn't keeping him between my legs and I let him drift to the side. He also got really lazy about the jump in the bottom right corner, but it was just set up on one of the jump block sets and didn't look very imposing so Jessica added jump blocks on top to make it look taller (like standards) and a couple of blocks under the pole to make it solid and then he had no problems with it.

I had a lot of issue getting left behind today, particularly on the second of that combination because I'd be like, "whew, got over the fence OH CRAP THERE'S ANOTHER ONE" hah. Also, though I said I've been riding more than once a month, I haven't ridden a ton this month between work and weather so I think I lost a bit of the strides I made forward in general riding fitness. I know Kieran has too because I couldn't tighten his girth as far as I did in March. Oops. We've gotta get back on the wagon if we want to show our faces in Aiken, right? :)

Anyway, here's some pictures and a video: