Of Ketschkers and Closing Sequences

In July, Steve Schwarz posted this course on his blog.  I set it up Tuesday and worked on it for a couple of days.

The interesting parts of this course for Belle and me were the turns at #9 and #14 and the closing sequence, 14-16.

I quickly discovered that unlike Steve, I was not quite quick enough to handle 9-11 if I chose to stay on the outside of the angle formed by 9 and 10.

Running on the inside, I had my choice of sending Belle to #11 around either upright of the jump.  I thought sending her around the right would be faster, but since the path was shorter going around the left upright, it was a wash as far as time was concerned.  Wrapping around the left upright seemed more comfortable for me as handler.

I decided I would try tightening up the turns at #9 and #11 with a Ketschker.  We had several miscommunications before we managed to get it right at both jumps on the same run :-)  I was surprised that it didn't seem to tighten up Belle's turn at #9, so I re-watched Steve's video and discovered two things.  First, I was not cuing the turn until the stride before the jump.  It was like "run, run, run, boom TURN."  The other handling flaw I spotted was that I was running up to or even slightly beyond the plane of the jump.  It looks like hanging back a couple of feet might produce a tighter turn.

We had one nice closing sequence using a blind cross, and I thought that was the way to go until I tried to duplicate it.  I lost sight of Belle as I did the cross and didn't realize she had failed to pick up on cue.  The front cross was a sure thing and certainly not that hard for me to get in.

I also tried using a rear cross, but it was counterproductive since I had to wait for Belle to pass me before I could resume running.  It worked, but it wasted time.