One Tempis

First- Happy New Year! Boyfriend and I spent New Years Eve at a party, then got up this morning to have a really nice breakfast before I headed down to ride my magnificent horse.


I've been keeping a secret for the last couple weeks. A secret you've probably guessed by the title of this post. The horse now has one tempis. Three in a row (which isn't that many but they exist!).

You see, it's dangerous when I don't ride with Tracey for a couple weeks. Rico is the kind of horse you can really push and experiment with. He never loses confidence or gets frustrated or really does anything wrong at all. In fact, a lot of the time he steps up and figures out what I'm saying and POOF we have some sort of advanced movement that we really shouldn't be schooling. Like one-tempis, the last of the Grand Prix movements that Rico needs installed.

I happened upon them one day when I decided that Rico and I were done stressing about the kicking change and were just going to play with tempis for fun. I started with 4s and 3s. Yeah every now and then he'd kick out, but the changes are getting cleaner and cleaner. I decided to do some 2s and they came SO easily. First 5 of them, then 9 of them. Hmmmm.

I kind of laughed at myself as I cantered across the diagonal and started asking for the ones. I started with just two of them- can we do a change and then another change right away?

It turns out- yes we can.

Over the couple weeks I've been playing with them. Doing two changes in a row. For a few days we only had them if I started on the left lead. We'd go left-right then right-left. Then Rico figured out the other side so then we could do right-left then left-right. Yesterday I discovered that we had three of them if I started left lead. LR then RL then LR.

Today he was just skipping around, doing his three changes in a row like it was no problem.

It's going to be a while before we have 15 of them... but I'm STOKED!! Our first lesson back from our little splint incident is on Tuesday. I'm assuming we'll do a bit in the pi/pa (which is going swimmingly) and then work on something a lot more basic than one-tempis.