Clean

TWO clean runs this weekend!!

Friday's was very slow. Like 1 1/2 off the fast time. I was safetied up. LOL. I wanted to make sure Moon completely understood the concept of maintaining his larger pockets. He was a rockstar.

Saturday I was kind of wanting to safety up as well...at least that was MY plan, but Moon had had enough of the slow crap and since the ground was deep and slow, I let him have a go of it.

I know, it's hard to see much of anything on these small videos and the arena was dusty as heck, so you can't see our turns. We had no snap at all on our first barrel, but I did remember to simply hold Moon in the turn so he didn't blow out and you can kind of see him start to blow out, hesitate, regather and then take off running in a straight line. I got a little wobbly right before the 2nd barrel. I knew we had enough room to make the turn, but old habits die hard...My body desperately wanted to do something...anything but just sit there and let him make the turn. To keep myself from making any dumb mistakes, I just dropped my hands to Moon's neck and let him take the turn by himself. It doesn't look like it in the video, but Moon really got bogged down behind that barrel and went a little wide. Any time I have enough time to think, 'Geez, he's not moving.' I know he's losing time. He came out headed straight at the 3rd barrel and I was thinking, 'Oh geez, I hope he moves over for me.' and I was starting to tighten up, but I could hear one of my buddies hollering, 'Talk to him!!!' from the back fence, so I just started telling Moon, 'Easy boy, Easy'...We both relaxed and he moved over and was around that 3rd barrel in perfect form. We ended up 3rd. I didn't even care about the placing...We had 2 clean runs in a row. Whoo-hooo!!

So it's working. Give the horse enough room to turn and he's plumb happy to stay off of the barrels. We definitely have some tightening up to do on that 2nd barrel...but I'm not going to worry about it. It will come.