Kathy Playdon Clinic, Day 2 Part 1

On Saturday morning, me and the BO pulled out of the lot to go to a full day of clinic lessons with Kathy.  We have both discovered that neither of us are fond of early mornings yet a mug of hot chocolate will always make it better.  Especially with a candy cane as a stir stick :)

The exercises we did in the morning were really quite fun and helped uncover and fix some holes in some of the riders' education.  We did a general warm-up, then started in on doing some pole exercises.  The first was riding a 10m circle over four raised poles.  There was a jump block in the middle of the circle (about 18" high at the most) and the poles had one end resting on it.  Kind of like a mini circle of death exercise: 

Far-away shot of the trotting exercise. 

From there we moved on to doing 20m canter circles with poles every quarter.  Koda and I managed it just fine, but others were having some issues, so we ended up being a lead pony for a few pairs.  Kathy saw that it was a bit easier for Koda and I so I got to ride no stirrups.  My poor poor thighs!!!  I haven't ridden no stirrups at a canter doing endless circles in a long time. 

Once the pole exercises were over, we moved onto a small gymnastic (small because our arena is not that big!): trot poles to a bounce, 1-stride to a vertical.  Koda gets a little put off with gymnastics still, but we managed it just fine.  The jumps went up for us to the point of 2'9", then the last vertical was made into an oxer.  Of course, whenever we were going over the bigger fences, we got no video or photos. 

Felt like flying and man does my boy have some scope!

At that point it was the end of our morning lesson, so we put the horses up in coolers, set them up with some lunch and got some lunch ourselves. 

This haybag is awesome, it's a slow feeder hay net 

Love good herdmates

Stay tuned for part 2 :)