getting the flow and having fun

I've been slack and didn't post a couple of days back. We've been renovating - that is my excuse, but it's not a very good one.

The day after the last post I went up again. This time I took Darcie for a walk. We backed up a way at first, doing "tap the air", then "waggle wave", then "marching". The backup is getting better - smoother. She has plenty of energy when she does it. Sometimes she gets confused and goes to start off in LFR rather than going backwards. More practice at learning what the different cues are more clearly will fix that.

Then practiced leading with her changing her pace to speed up and slow down and stop with me (trot, fast walk, slow walk [which she found the hardest to do, to slow those feet right down], halt), and also responding to my hand pointing ahead for her to speed up.

We did some sending exercise up and down a bit of a bank/cut away. She was quite full of beans and throwing some excited bucks in so we did LFR 1 up and down the bank, to give her a bit more of a workout.

Then some more backup and some more leading, and then "run up and rub" and "slap and tap" in a different environment to the one I'd been doing it in before. (Oh and had been doing rubbing with the stick in between the other stuff, and rubbing her head, and ears, and nose, and things.)

On the way back from that we did some changing direction/changing sides stuff that I'm not sure if it has a CA name but was a useful thing to do, where I just switch hands and direction and she shifts her front end around to follow without running over me, and that flowed into some circle driving and changes of direction in that. Then some more leading practice on the way back to the paddock.

It was all nice and flowing, and fun too, not so much a "training session" as "having fun" with plenty of good training stuff thrown in.