Was 25 degrees when I left my house for practice this a.m. Don't know how cold it was in the arena, not Polar Vortex cold but Crazypants Dog Off His Head cold. We started off with lots of extension, no collection, big wide crazy turns and it didn't help that I had the course wrong in my head for the first half. Things went a lot smoother once Crazypants settled down a little and I ran the actual course which was way easier than my imagined course. Course was from this month's Kathy Keats Free Training Exercise at Clean Run. We only did Exercises 1 & 2 which was plenty given we have a 3 day USDAA trial this weekend.
Exercise #1 where I get to try a Serpentine Blind Cross (think I called it a Serpentine Rear Cross on the video, serves me
right for multi-tasking but I can't be bothered to fix it now) which I think is what the One Mind folks call a 'German Turn'. But don't quote me on that, I'm not entirely sure. Comparing the wrap at the end of the last 2 runs you can see how much tighter of a turn I get with the Ketschker (Jaako, whatever) compared to the post turn.
2014-01-08-Handling Practice Ex 1 from colliebrains on Vimeo.
Exercise #2 went a lot better though still there's one section I could have made clearer. There were no weaves in the original Kathy Keats exercise, we added those and in this exercise I tried both weave entries. I had to manage them a lot but was pleased he was able to get them and stay in the poles. For some reason he does really well with his weaves at this arena and with this particular set of poles. Of course the best smoothest entry of all happened after I turned the video off and decided to try one last time.
2014-01-08-Handling Practice Ex 2 from colliebrains on Vimeo.
Feeling good about the trial this weekend, especially the Masters Challenge courses, looking forward to those and Steeplechase most of all.
Is that the GoPro camera again? What a great tool for this kind of thing. Can see everything and the quality seems nice and sharp.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely a big difference with that K/J turn at the end vs. the post turn. I'm just starting to learn about some of these fancy moves but can already see how useful they can be.
The GoPro is working great!!
ReplyDeleteI do love my GoPro. I did a bit of editing, zooming in a bit closer, playing with exposures, sharpness, etc. The only problem is now my computer is too slow to process the larger files.
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