Training

Yesterday I trained Scandal again, first time since Sunday when she hurt herself. I trained her at my grans field, with my old jumps (ohhh Id forgotton the joys of having to stick the nail of the arm of the jump back into the main part of the jump to keep it upright!!) as 1. I didnt want to drive too far and 2. I thought it may be a good idea if I trained Scandal in a different place to last time, for my own peace of mind. I let Scandal have her ball as I walked into the field as she does her own warm up of cantering around for a few minutes. I did wonder what sort of training session we'd have when she took herself over a jump set on small height and she leapt over it so high I'm sure she'd have cleared the KC 26" height! Certainly wasn't planning on letting the pole attack her again!

I started off just doing some wing wraps with her, the jumps on small height, which I left them on for the entire training session as I just want to make sure she is fully confident again before I raise them. She did some good wing wraps, the only thing is, if I do a wing wrap round a jump, and then the next time want her to do a "go on" after that same jump, she wants to do another wing wrap, i.e. she's repeating what she did last time, not listening to commands. Same vice versa, if we've done that jump previously as a "go on", and then I ask her to wing wrap the next time, she wants to jump long. By the end of the session we did seem to be making progress. I've been quite lazy with wing wraps and haven't done much of them until this last month, so have to start doing them more often now.

We did some 'fun' stuff, I've set the jumps quite randomly, i.e. they aren't in straight lines, so she is having to look for the jumps, part of the stuff Dave told me to work on with her, to get her powering off, rather than being all 'floaty' which is what she does if she's not sure where she's going. She's got amazing speed on straight lines, but anywhere else, she just doesn't use any of her power. So yesterday we worked purely on having tons of fun, she made mistakes, disappeared numerous times to the wrong one, but I think she was suprised at how excited mumma was. Don't know whether she thought her punishment for knocking a jump over on Sunday was 3 days of lead walks and no training, so she thought she better try extra hard! But she was awesome. I need that attitude for every training session. I just feel like I need to do more with her than we are. Yesterday I trained for 10 minutes and she was knackered. So our entire training sesh was...10 minutes - if I'm only doing 10 minutes a time then I need to be doing more than 1 or 2 sessions a week.

We've got another lesson booked with Dave for February, boy do we need it! Hopefully Scandal will be able to do her running contact on his dog walk and a) not fall off, b) not jump off and c) impress Dave at the same time ;-)

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