A day in the life - Laura Thomas

For professional show rider, Laura Thomas, her busy lifestyle revolves around horses 24/7.

She manages the family's busy horse transport business, which is a pick up and drop off depot for horses travelling between destinations, with trucks coming and going all hours of the day and night. In between, Laura finds time to work her show horses.

Work hours are unpredictable, somedays I'm up at 4am, and other days it's 7am.

It's straight out of bed and out to the horses. My parents and I check all the transport horses and our own horses, feed them breakfast, change rugs, put them into their yards or paddocks, clean the stables.
Once the horses are done, I go inside and have my breakfast, while I watch the news. After breakfast the four show horses are worked, this fits in between trucks coming and going to unload and load horses. The trucks take priority.

When the show horses are worked we start on the two breakers and two young horses. After the horses are worked, I usually go to the local shops to get something for dinner or banking for the business or just errands. Then it's back home to feed all the horses.
Somedays we are very busy with the transport horses so the show horses have a day off.

Depending on the night, if a VIP event is happening at my local Horseland Sunbury store I will attend, as I am a sponsored rider. And I have recently taken on an agent job with Equilume so things might be a little different this year!
At the end of the day, I will either cook dinner or go out for dinner with friends. Bedtime again depends on late night transport drops and pick-ups, sometimes it's midnight or I might get an early night, say 10pm.

Story from Horse Deals Magazine - January 2017

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