Pull throughs – AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

This is the write up for my lesson before I went on hol, I will do the one for yesterday later :)

Jemma

Jem did well, getting her weaves everytime and despite shocking contacts to start with they improved loads and were really nice at the end. The third course of our lesson (shows how good she was as it didn’t take much to improve the first two :D ) involved pull throughs, something which I have always struggled with (don’t ask me why) and I had to do two in succession (this was in the jumping course at the fun competition and we struggled with it). The bit i struggled with to start with was getting her to go to the first jump when i was stood closer to the second jump as she came out the tunnel, anyway it didn’t take much to crack that and then I seemed to manage not too bad, it just took a couple of attempts to get it. So all in all a good lesson for her, I still want to work on her contacts a bit more over winter, although I don’t think she has ever done a slow one in competition, only when she has already been faulted and I decide I will work them properly!! I also think we still need to work a little bit on our pull throughs - I need to be able to get them first time in competition!!!

Elliot

He took a few more attempts at the first course because he kept coming out the weaves at number 10 even though they were the second obstacle and the tunnel was two jumps away and i have it on good authority that i was doing nothing different!! Anyway, we eventually cracked them and he worked the rest of the course nicely and nice and speedy, although he needed some work on a right turn after a straight line and I proved that I think he does know his directions really which is good as it means I can start using them properly!! Because of how long it had taken us to do the weaves we did the third course second as we wanted to make sure I had time to practise the pull throughs with him too – what a good job we did (well sort of!) – it must have taken me at least 30 attempts if not more to get it right and even then when i did it was a bit of a bodge job but we decided after how long it had taken we would leave it at that and work on them every lesson for a while!!! I don’t know what I was doing but my shoulders would insist on pointing the wrong way to start with so I couldn’t get him over the first jump and then once I had cracked that i couldn’t get in the right position for the first pull through, once i cracked that it took me AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGES to be able to be the right position to send him over the second jump to then be in the right place for the second pull through basically all in all i just made a complete mess of it for a very long time and about half way through this mess Lel took Elliot and did it first time just to prove even more that it was me and not him – yeh, thanks Lel!!!