Another good lesson

 Our trainer went to a clinic with Doug Payne this week and she brought several of those exercises back for us to work on.  One of the things we have been working on is re-training my brain.  I used to go into a course hyper fixated on each jump, which meant I gave a rubbish ride because I did nothing in between the fences.  The mental image we have been using is that I am writing a story, in a good book there is always something between the plot points.  So I have to use the time between fences to "write a better story."  

It has been working really well at getting my focus off the jump and back on his canter and our line.  This week we added another step.  We basically serpentined around the arena taking jumps in pairs, but after each jump was a task. Come back to a trot in between these fences, walk after the bounces, trot the rollback to the poles, canter in front of the vertical.   Most jumps had placing poles at tack off and landing.  It was my job to ride the inbetween, and if Uno didn't take the correction, the poles would sort him out to still have a good jump. It started off really abrupt, but as I focused more the in between and the creating time between jumps, it got much better.  The final jump on our course felt like some the best form and balance we have ever had.

Also I did not pull him to a stop at anything, and we were able to jump right in without working up to the "proper" fence height.