Pivo Test Ride Raven Dressage

I bought a PIVO so I can more easily record my rides when no one else is around.  This should make the blog easier, and more importantly it allows me to critique my own rides.  Sometimes I can feel the horse doing something odd and can't identify why exactly, but seeing it on video will often answer my questions and allow me to address it in a different way.

This weekend Raven and I are going to the schooling horse trial at Sunrise Equestrian in Fort Collins to work at prelim level, and this week in preparation I've been allotting some time for dressage test memorization.  Because of the head injury I have limited short term memory, so it's really important that I memorize my dressage test days or even weeks ahead of a show to ensure it's coded in my long term memory.  If it's stored there I can almost always recall it when I get to the show.  If I have someone call the test to me at the show my short term memory doesn't usually allow me to hear the caller and then also perform the maneuver.  There's nothing so frustrating to me as preparing for a dressage test, and then losing points because I couldn't remember what the caller shouted out mere seconds ago.  

Raven and I have been practicing our trot-halt-trot transitions as well as leg yields and smaller circles.  As usual the things most challenging for her are remaining soft and relaxed through her topline and moving through her whole spine.  

Her canter work tends to be pretty good, she's more likely to be tense at the trot, but everything in this test is work that she's very familiar with.  Now we see if she'll remain focused at the show, knowing that Casper is also going to ride at a lower level and will probably be calling to her from the parking area. 

Here is her video of the test (with some wonky geometry in order to get around some of the jumps....) from the PIVO.  It did lose us when we cantered past and were too close to it, but otherwise did a pretty decent job of videoing and staying focused on Raven.  I was curious if it would accidentally switch to tracking the dogs, but so far that hasn't been an issue at all.

A few days ago I messed with the PIVO to get a feel for how it works and how best to situate it in the arena to minimize distractions like large jump standards or the horse passing the camera too quickly.  Here's the video of Daisy doing her jump course from that evening.

Excited to see how it goes this weekend!