Dylan's Blog: Weaves

Weaves are the bane of my existence at the moment! I love seeing weaves in classes and they’re one of Kim’s favourite obstacles, but I’d forgotten how much I hate training them!

I suppose that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I love training with Dylan, and the small milestones we hit are worth the trouble, but I really need to train the weaves everyday with him and I just can’t, which means when I do train, we end up jumping back a few steps from whatever progress we made in the last session.

On Sunday Dylan was doing great in the channel weaves, about 2/3″ apart, but as soon as they closed up to the kind of gap we were doing the week before he was bailing out. I tried again today with my stick-in-the-ground weaves in the park and he actually did really well; the poles were in a straight line at the base and slightly V’ed to about an inch on either side.  We finished the session with a set of 4 complete uprights, with a V’ed start pole (because entries are still difficult!) and he did it brilliantly.

Unfortunately I have now discovered another problem! Dylan is much, much happier weaving ahead of me, he’s faster, drives on better, and is more accurate if I walk four or five weaves behind him and let him get on with it. But that means I have to stop, wait for him to pick up the entry and then walk behind him at exactly the right distance! Arg! Not what I want. So that’s another thing to work on.

Part of me is pleased at his progress as he genuinely seems to enjoy weaving, and he has a good technique and he’s fast. I can see he’s going to be a great weaver when we crack it! But it feels like we’ve been doing this for months, but we’ve still got such a long way to go.