I love jumping and I really do miss the competitive jumping. Well I miss all jumping
Coffee can jump, throw shapes, and it doesn't matter what size fence you put in front of me but I just cant get my balance and confidence jumping Alfie, no matter how small the height
When I tried Alfie we had a little jump and soon after we popped a fairly decent sized track in Hen's field but it was soon evident it wasn't going to be our main discipline
I have learnt to love dressage and both Coffee and Alfie will dance the boards but it doesn't beat the thrill of the coloured poles.
Gridwork
Ali runs regular Gridwork Clinics so I decided to join the fun and see if we can recover some of our lost confidence. Start to get that back end working and both brains less over thinking about these coloured things.
We decided to pay for private sessions as some of our exits can be a bit hair raising
In a super soft bit with not a lot of breaking with the wisdom of video playback...…. When it all feels like its totally out of control and super uncomfortable play back the video and realise it wasn't all that bad and you can look forward to the next session.
Roll forward to December 2018 and to our surprize we did it and slowly with the extra shorter stride between each element.
We had push not pull
We left the jumps up most of the time
We jumped out of canter without rocket launch
Have to admit had a few possible wet knicker moments (and not because of the rain) mainly when the bounce got added in and again when the massive (little) jump went up at the end of the grid.
I almost kept my cool. I wasn't particularly nervous but I was rather verbal all the way through the lesson so inwardly I must have been kackin it just a little bit