Psycho Clinic

 This is the "psycho clinic" in Laramie. It was at a friend's stable and Daniel Stewart was the clinician. He coached the US showjumping olympic team and has a heavy focus on sports psychology. The point of this clinic is to increase your ability to ignore distractions and handle stress. Basically this exercise had 8 cross-rail fences set up in varying angles and distances within a 20 meter circle. He would shout out the course to you as you cantered in, and you then had to enter immediately and jump your course of 12 fences while he attempted to distract you with chatter and questions. It is way harder than it looks!

 It included very tight turns

 Major shows off the suspension in his stride - only 1 foot on the ground.

 Diagonal/crooked lines of jumps

Even though the jumps were very small, the mind game was very difficult.  We've never knocked down so many rails as we did at this clinic - but we had a great time.  It stressed Major a little since he REALLY doesn't like to make mistakes and hit the rails, but when he realized I wasn't worried about it he settled down and understood he wasn't going to be in trouble.