I felt guilty leaving my daughter to ride again, says Zara
King’s niece talks of struggle to return to equestrian career after birth of elder child
ZARA Tindall has revealed that she felt guilty about leaving her elder daughter as a working mother, in a candid interview with her husband Mike.
The Olympic equestrian medallist, and the Princess Royal’s daughter, said she “found it hard” to get back into riding professionally after giving birth to Mia, now aged nine.
In the first interview instalment of Mike Drop, a series made in collaboration with the Magic Millions Australian horse-racing event, she told her husband: “Mentally, you feel guilty as a mother leaving your child to go and do something else.”
The former England rugby captain, 44, quipped that was because she didn’t “trust dad”, but Zara added: “You do feel guilty. I felt guilty all the time, even going to go and ride. I just thought ‘That’s just an aspect of my life now’.”
The King’s niece also opened up about her struggle to “get her body back to where it was” after having Mia in 2014, saying that she was determined to return to riding.
The 41-year-old said: “When you’ve been riding for 25 years then your body is not doing that, and your muscles [are] doing nothing and stretching and creating an amazing thing – it’s completely different. I found [that] hard work.”
She acknowledged that the couple balanced her career with their life as new parents, saying that Mia “was along for the ride with us as well” and was “very much taken around to the shows”.
The Tindalls, who have been married since 2011, also touched on their experience with miscarriage.
Tindall asked his wife whether she felt she gave riding “everything you wanted to give it” during that period.
She told him: “There’s times I look back on and maybe shouldn’t have gone to certain places. But I think I was lucky, I’d had Toytown and High Kingdom [her horses] and been to an Olympics and got a silver medal.
“The stuff I missed was down to another great chapter in my life. I’m lucky that I got to run them alongside each other. I hope it has made me a better mother.”
The mother-of-three won silver at the 2012 Olympics in London, becoming the first Olympic medallist from the Royal family.
Her mother – the only other member of the Royal family to compete in an Olympics, in Montreal 1976 – presented the team eventing medals.
Elsewhere in the couple’s 30-minute interview, she discussed how her love of riding stemmed from always being around horses in her childhood.
She said: “I remember being around horses when I was young. My mother and father were riding. It was very much their career at the time, we would do lots of stuff at home with them.
“If we weren’t in the house, we were up in the yard looking after them, learning about them.”
She added that that her “driving force” now is to win Olympic gold .