Thursday Lesson

We didn't do any real jump course yesterday. We did a lot of work on 'skill building'.
  At the front end of the arena, we had a two pillons set up in the corners and in the middle we had several jump poles on the ground. We had to trot between the pillons, the walls and then through the rails on the grounds. The idea was to collect in the corners and then lengthen through the rails and along the walls.
  We did well at the trot, until we had to jump the box that was but in the rail passage. He kept on scooting out to the right or left depending on our direction. But eventually we got it.

                     "                             "
                "                                      "
              ___   ____     ____   _____    
              ___    ____      ___      ____
Ha, so that's an attempted diagram of what we did. Without the box jump.
He did okay at the canter, we broke to a trot frequently, but that's not a surprise, Tommy hates having to use his hind end at the canter so it was good pratice for him.
   For that actually jumping bit, he did really well over the vertical. Only once did we end up trotting over it because we had a bad distance over the poles.
   The oxer was good, with one run out since I turned him to early and he broke to a trot. He clipped the oxer each time we went over, but we figured that it was because we didn't have a lot of the momentum we would have if we'd had other jumps leading up to the oxer, but he did well.
  Since I didn't make it out on Monday, I'm planning on going out on Sunday, hoping it will be nice out enough to head out on the trails.