Videos, and Post Show Week Recap

I was very excited to receive my show videos of tests Training 1 and 3, unfortunately she was unable to get 2.   Purchased from Smith Videography:

 Cupid got a well-earned day off on Monday, and Tuesday I thought he would a break from dressage to practice coursing over poles and cavaletti.  He felt great on the flat warming up, and the poles course felt solid.  We had some of our best lead changes to date, with barely a step of trot in between.

On Wednesday we did ground driving, walk and trot with circles and serpentines and going over some poles.  We ended with a little in-hand work.  Cupid seems to have figured out that if I stop him mid-way over a pole I'm going to ask for a side pass. 

Thursday morning I found Cupid was a scrape on his right hind leg and a few bite marks on his back, but luckily all superficial.  I set up some trail obstacles in the arena for another fun day.  We weaved through cones, backed through parallel poles, walked between two coops, and practiced opening and closing a rope gate between two jump standards.  We managed to do the gate though our form and technique needs work! 

On Friday we had a lesson.  It started out slow, as in Cupid was being quite poky.  He eventually warmed up out of it.  We had a really nice transition into the left lead canter and the canter itself was nice and balanced so we decided to end on that note for canter, and focus on trot work.  We played a little with lengthenings, first on a 20 meter circle lengthening after coming out of a 10 meter circle, then we did a shallow serpentine up one long side of the arena to work on bending and come across the diagonal with the lengthening.  Although we need to keep working to get a true lengthening it did make our working trot pretty nice after!