More SJ schooling – watch out Whitakers!

We went for our 2nd SJ schooling session at Hoplands last Saturday, and managed to build on the success of the last outing. We had a few ‘yes’ ‘no’ ‘maybe’ moments to begin with as I had failed to establish an active enough canter. I find it really hard to feel on Soap when he is in the correct SJing canter as he is just so comfortable in all his ‘special versions of canter’, but when he dropped into the right soft, but active canter he began snorting in time with the stride. This ‘SJ Snorting’ is a huge help as I now have an audible indicator that he is working well, and hopefully that will help me tune in to the right feel in time. There was a fresh new course designed and it all looked about BE100 height so we left it at that and got started, after our initial warm up I worked on really riding positively through the corners and maintaining activity, and an even stride. We did the course first of all adding small circles between fences to regain the canter if Soap had become flat or fast, and this worked really well. I then gave him a little breather as this new more activated gait tires him out much quicker, and then when he was ready to resume we finished by doing the whole course minus the ‘control circles’ He was fab! the idea of ‘getting over and leaving it up’ is really sinking in, finally! He only had 2 down in the final round one was the back pole of the 2nd part of the double because I got a long stride to the first part, and the fence after that which was the shortest related distance on the course of 4 strides and we just got in too close.