KEY POINTS:
Lee Tiley has found another winner.
It's nearly 14 months since she guided one home on the racetrack, but as a qualified personal fitness trainer the high-profile jockey has found a second calling.
She might need that if all does not go well in her attempted comeback to
race riding.
Tiley badly broke her femur in the first week of February last year and is facing a tough battle to be able to make it back as a headlining top jockey.
The South Auckland-based horsewoman spoke of her physical problems in the oddest of settings, instructing as a personal trainer at the Les Mills Auckland City gym yesterday.
Her physical rehabilitation copped a setback last August when surgeons removed the locking screw from her hip joint that was put in place to stabilise the area after the breakage.
She says that at the moment she does not have sufficient hip rotation to even think about race riding.
"I can't get into a riding position because the internal rotation of the hip is limited.
"I'd like to have a go at riding work, but at the moment things are not good enough to get on to a horse's back.
"The trauma is where the screws went through my hip. Where the actual break happened is fine."
Surgeons are waiting to see what the effect will be from cortisone injections two weeks ago.
Tiley has always been a fitness freak.
Jockeys are among the world's toughest and fittest athletes, but no amount of physical work has ever been enough for Tiley.
Even when she would be riding at a high-profile Ellerslie meeting she would do what most senior jockeys don't do - ride trackwork that morning.
And most times she would go for a run between the trackwork session and leaving for the races.
"Fitness has always been a passion for me," she says.
"It's something I can do if things don't go well."
Tiley says she is grateful for the help of one of the managers of Les Mills, Norm Phillips, himself a former jockey who was apprenticed to the late Gary Ritchie.
Her last winner was Derry City for the McKee stable at Te Rapa on February 4 last year.
Her accident, a few days later, was not the result of a race fall.
She was attempting to open a gate from the back of a horse at home when it took fright.
In a million-to-one happening, her husband, former international jockey Nigel Tiley, broke a leg falling from the same horse when galloping it at the beach a few days later.
