Tuesday, October 7, 2014

2 Point October is Back!

I just participated for fun last year and sucked.  This year I thought I would genuinely give it a go.  2 point is not something I practice.  If I join a lesson at my trainer's place with the kids I usually get tortured with it but that's almost the only time.  Oh and then there was the show 3 weeks ago where a BNT asked me to hack a second horse for her client in the U/S class.  I got in my best huntery half seat at the canter and thought I was going to die.  So yeah, this challenge will be good for me.

For obvious reasons I am choosing to do this on Poppy vs Baby L.  When I am on a course where there is a long distance between jumps I will get up in a 2 point and gallop.  And Poppy LOVES this.  Do you see where this is going?  2 point = gallop so my goal in the challenge will be to do it for as long as we can stay under control and hopefully continue to get better.  I chose do get my baseline at the canter.  She actually stayed really quiet and cantered around like a hunter princess.  Toward the end she picked up the pace a bit but I was tired anyway.

 
This number shocked me.  My baseline was 2:05 last year on Tank and last night felt like the same amount of time.  So now I'm worried I came out of the gate to fast and I will never improve on that lol!

After 2 point torture I did some little jumps with Poppy.  I don't know what was wrong with me but I couldn't find a distance to a 2'3 cross rail to save my life.  Like so ugly that one time Poppy hunched her back on landing and threatened to buck like "woman get your shit together!"  I found my hole basically. I was trying to keep her quiet for the 2 point and was obviously not getting the correct pace as I switched over to jumping. HA!!! Guess what I will be working on this week!!!  Jumping little stuff is hard in my opinion because you can easily get sucked into no pace.  When the jumps go up I have a easier time finding a good rhythm.  Soooo I think my exercise this week will be to incorporate some small jumps into my hacking.

9 comments:

  1. Incremental improvement every ride!

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  2. nice baseline! and i hear ya on the distances being easier for the bigger stuff (tho i am quite sure our definition of 'big' is vastly different lol) - with ground poles being the absolute hardest for finding a good distance

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    1. Oh ground poles used to be the worst for me! Now I have them all over the place and incorporate them every ride!

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  3. My time sucks so bad this year. I'm trying to fix things with my equitation... and the pain.

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  4. I was also like, "Jeeze, maybe I should have started out at thirty seconds so I look like I really improved by the end of the month!"

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    1. See, I wanted to do this but it's sort of dishonest. Plus no way I'm hardcore enough to out and out win, so I'm not competing because my pride can't stand to let me stay in the running unless they have a "most mediocre" prize, which I would totally gun for.

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