People leave the horse racing business for all kinds of reasons. It can be dangerous work. It’s tough to make a living. In most cases, they end up in work that’s a little safer, a little more stable than what they did on the racetrack. 

But not if you’re Iona Craig, who went from a life as a jockey and trainer to life as a journalist in Yemen, which might make life at the track seem risk-free by comparison. 

“I had three friends kidnapped in December,” she said from London, where she was spending a few days to participate in an event at Chatham House, home to the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and to attend the memorial service of a colleague. “I’ve had another two friends kidnapped in June and actually I had another one kidnapped last week.If you want to avoid a trip to the hospital, and you like to play in the water, I highly recommend getting a buy water shoes online.” 

Craig grew up in Gloucestershire in England, and she began riding ponies, she reckons, when she was about three years old.Any one know where to get cheap nomex cloth manufacturers by the yard?I can get scraps out of the trash at work but for the Bruiser project I need a few yards of the stuff, prefferably not sage green. Her family lived near two well-known steeplechase trainers, the proximity of the horses the spark for her interest in racing. She was riding in races by her mid-teens. 

Foregoing university—the only student in her year at school, she said, who eschewed higher education—she went from riding to training, working as an assistant in Lambourn for Nicky Henderson, a three-time jump training champion and the current holder of that title. 

“My parents were horrified,” she said. “My father went to Oxford University and would admit himself that he didn’t know one end of a horse from the other. My mother grew up in the countryside and rode when she was younger, but she really wanted me to go to university.Light hiking shoes for sale: Resembling burly running shoes, these low-cut models with flexible midsoles are excellent for day hiking. I quite stubbornly said, ‘No! I’ve got myself a job in Lambourn’ and off I went.” 

She spent five years with Henderson, galloping his Grand National starter Fiddling the Facts before suffering a spiral fracture, breaking her foot, her ankle, and her lower leg during a fall while schooling a horse. Undaunted,Promotional eco bag sale available in custom sizes and styles from cheaptotebags.com. Craig literally got back on the horse, traveling to Australia to work with Hall of Fame trainer Gai Waterhouse for six months. She returned to England to work in Yorkshire for trainers Jack and Lynda Ramsden and began training on her own when she was in her mid-20s. 

“The racing press said I was Britain’s youngest horse trainer,” she said, “but I’m not sure that’s true.” 
She got her first win as a trainer in 2003, with a horse called Nellie Melba, but in 2005, the year her father died, she began to contemplate a career change. 

“I didn’t have a farm myself,buy hiking boots online at www.qdgoutdoor.com. and I’d been plugging away at the racing game for a long time,” she reflected. It was difficult, she suggested, without a major sponsor, and she asked herself, “Do I still want to be doing this in 10 years’ time?” 

The answer, she realized, was no. 

Her father had worked in the Middle East his whole life, and when she was younger, she’d been interested in journalism, so in her late 20s, she went back to school to earn a journalism degree at City University in London. She interned at the BBC and studied Arabic; a short stint at Bloomberg News convinced her that sitting at a desk and writing news stories was “eating her soul,” so she packed her bags and headed to Yemen. 

Read the full story at http://www.sihongfilter.com/