Chatting to a Friend

Cath Wallis is an Australian ultra endurance athlete who has completed some of the world’s toughest foot races.

She is also a mother of three with a busy career and those had been her passions and her focus for many years. It was during a step up in her career, aged about 40, when she realised she had nothing interesting to write in her bio for the new job that life changed forever.

She dug deep and realised that the thing that really lit her up was the great outdoors and being in wide open spaces so she embarked upon what one might consider a foolish endeavour – she entered a 100km race with no previous walking or running experience and with only three months to get fit. She completed it within the time – just – and swore she would never do anything so stupid again…

At this point it is probably worth mentioning that Cath does not look like society tells us a trail runner should. She is a big person, as she puts it, and her mission is to encourage people who may never imagine they could do something extraordinary to take those first steps and conquer the fear. To get on and live out their dreams and hopes and adventures in the only body they will ever have and to hell with what they should look like/be like/feel like.

Her chat is brilliant, funny and full of great anecdotes about her adventures (for example The Canberra 100, The Big Red Run, The Oman Desert Marathon, Hellespont Race and Race to the Wreck) and especially the most recent one: competing in the Simpson Desert Ultra, as its ambassador, with a team of 18 amazing women who took it on having never done anything like that before.

For more info on how you can join Cath on her adventures:

https://www.findyouradventure.online/

IG: @cath.wallis

https://www.facebook.com/plussizeadventurer/

Mimi Anderson began running at 36 very quickly discovery her love of running silly distances. Mimi is a multiple Guinness World Record Holder taking part in races around the world running across Deserts, mountains, jungle, surviving the freezing temperatures of the Arctic and the extreme heat of Death Valley in America setting records and on occasions beating the men!

As well as taking part in races Mimi enjoys organising her own adventures; in 2004 she ran from Paris to London starting with the Paris Marathon and finishing the 300 plus mile run with the London Marathon.

In 2014 Mimi ran 1,242 miles across South Africa and in 2017 ran 2,217 miles across America in an attempt to set another World Record that sadly was brought to an end due to injury.

She is well known for taking on some of the worlds toughest races and not just doing them once but running back to the start once she has finished. Mimi has now embraced endurance cycling and has overcome her fear of water taking part in her first triathlon! 

We chat about anorexia and beating it so her children wouldn’t grow up to think it was normal. We talk about going from no running experience to doing the Marathon des Sables within a year!

The conversation also covers her world records, losing her father while in the middle of the Yukon and just “knowing” the very minute it happened, despite being thousands of miles away, and how she regained her identity when running was no longer an option.

Mimi’s book first book “Beyond Impossible” and her new book “Limitless” are available on Amazon. 

www.marvellousmimi.com 
@marvellousmimi - instagram 
@MarvellousMimi - Twitter 
https://www.facebook.com/mimi.anderson.526 
MarvellousMimi - Athletes Page FB

Rea Kolbl is a professional athlete, competing in obstacle course racing, adventure racing, trail running, mountain biking, and ski mountaineering. She is the current Spartan Ultra World Champion, 2x World’s Toughest Mudder champion, and undefeated at endurance OCR for race distances 30 miles or longer. She loves outdoor adventure, multisport projects in the mountains, and exploring the world self-propelled. Her biggest adventure yet was the World’s Toughest Race: eco-challenge Fiji, a 670km+ expedition adventure race where her team Canada Adventure finished in 2nd place. When she’s not outside training and exploring, she’s coaching other athletes, cooking, and working on her adventure van.

Instagram:        https://www.instagram.com/reakolbl/

Facebook:         https://www.facebook.com/rkolbl

Website:           https://kolblrea.wordpress.com/

Rea’s record:    13th March 2021, 55,045ft/16,777.72m, beating previous world record of 50,656ft/15,440m

Martina Valmassoi is a mountain lover. She grew up in an active family starting sports early.

She grew up as Nordic skier and then moved to ski mountaineering when she was 17 and became part of the Italian National team for 10 years, until 2016.

After that as she was traveling a lot in summer with her job as a photographer so decided to leave the skimo World Cup but didn’t quite give up racing. She is also a trail runner.

Best results:

Multiple times top 10 in Skimo WC

2 x 3rd place Skimo World Championship, Alpago Tambre 2017 . Team Race and Relay.

7th in the individual 

5 times podium at the Sellaronda Skimarathon.

2 golds and the actual course Record with Laetitia Roux.

2 Silver ( one in mixed team with Anton Krupicka)

1 bronze at my first Sellaronda back in 2013

3 podiums at Pierramenta 

Summer

3th The Rut 50k in 2015 (first long race)

3th Tromso Skyrace 2016

5th Trofeo Kima 2018

2nd 90 km of Marathon du Montblanc in 2019

Instagram:        https://www.instagram.com/martiskka/

Facebook:        https://www.facebook.com/martina.valmassoi

Martina’s record:  22nd March 2021, 57,890.42ft/17,645m, taking the world record after only week

Grace Staberg  is a mountain athlete, competing in skimo racing and trail running. She has multiple World Cup podiums in skimo, 2 World Cup Vertical wins and a silver medal in the Vertical race from World Championships. She loves exploring the mountains and human-powered adventures. When she’s not training or racing she attends the London School of Economics, studying Finance. 

Instagram:        https://www.instagram.com/grace.staberg/

Website:           https://www.gracestaberg.com/

Grace’s record: 26th April 2021, 56,153ft/17,115.43m, taking the North American Women’s Record from Rea

Annabel Abbs is a writer and hiker, whose latest book, WIndswept: Walking in the Footsteps of Remarkable Women, looks at how distance walking in wild places changed women of the past and asks why we know so little about them.

In this entertaining and fascinating chat, we cover her wild and unconventional childhood in the wilds of Wales and her parents’ interest in schooling her and her sister based on the principles of the French author (and serial child abandoner) Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

We talk about the motivation for the book, to discover the women walking and to make public their extraordinary feats and why what they did was so different from male walkers and adventurers. Hint: it’s less about conquering and more about resetting and finding freedom.

We talk about the fear (to a greater or lesser extent) that all women carry when partaking in in such activities alone and her absolute belief that we can harness this sensation and make it work for us.

The discussion also covers motherhood, its all-encompassing role in the life of women with children and how walking, moving, being outside near water, trees and open spaces can help everyone.

If you’re wondering where I got my information about acknowledging fear, thanking it and asking it to get behind you, it’s neither Glennon Doyle or Brené Brown that I heard it from (as I muse in the interview) but a woman named Andrea Callanan. It may not be hers originally but it was from her that I heard it.

www.annabelabbs.com

@annabelabbs (Inst and Twitter)

@abbsannabel (FB)

Emily Woodhouse is an award-winning adventure travel writer, published author and Guinness World Record holding adventurer.

Founder of Intrepid Magazine, she works to help break stereotypes about women in the outdoors. Previous expeditions include walking all the tors on Dartmoor and cycling to Switzerland and back.

She holds the Guinness World Record for climbing the most 3000m peaks in a week, which she did in the Sierra Nevada mountains in Spain in 2020. We have a good old chat about her tough week and what she learned from it.

The conversation ranges from growing up outdoors to understanding how much she needed it in her life as she left home for university. We also discuss her life-long passion for writing and how she has found herself combining it with her other love, adventure, to forge a career. Her website, Travelling Lines, and her magazine really are incredible and very inspiring.

Finally, we chat about defining adventure and that realising that doing what you think you “should” be doing is never a match for, deep down, what you really want to do.

We didn’t talk about Emily’s #challengecatie for two reasons: 1. I forgot to ask her (sorry!) and 2. When she did tell me about it, it made more sense to not tell anyone about it on a re-recording.

It is this: to go camping by myself, only telling one person for safety’s sake, where I will be and not telling anyone else about it. At all. Ever. So that it’s an adventure just for the sake of adventure, not to boast or “name drop” or be validated. I like it. How much, you’ll never find out!

@travellinglines on Instagram/Facebook

@travellingline on Twitter

www.travellinglines.com

www.intrepid-magazine.com

Jo Moseley, 56, is a Mum of two sons, aged 24 & 20. She lives on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales. Jo describes herself as a beach cleaner, joy encourager & midlife adventurer.

In August 2019, Jo became the first woman to SUP (stand up paddleboard) coast to coast 162 miles along the Leeds Liverpool Canal, picking up litter, fundraising and raising awareness of the problems of single use plastic.

She loves writing, speaking about adventure and wellbeing and making tiny films about the joy of the outdoors for our mental health after losing her Mum + a difficult menopause. Her films Finding Joy and Found at Sea have both won awards.

Jo launched her wonderfully received podcast on Christmas Eve called The Joy of SUP - The Paddleboarding Sunshine Podcast.

https://thejoyofsuppodcast.buzzsprout.com/

A documentary film about her adventure has just been released to a great reception and 4 sell out online screenings. It’s called Brave Enough - A Journey Home to Joy. The trailer is here:

https://vimeo.com/502656424?ref=em-share

She also has a newsletter called Postcards of Joy - Stories to Lift the Soul. Here is a copy of April’s. https://shoutout.wix.com/so/e6NVbFruL?languageTag=en&cid=b43ef226-2c1f-43b8-8cb7-86a4259f4b40#/main

Www.jomoseley.com

Twitter and Instagram @healthyhappy50 @thejoyofsuppodcast_

Facebook The Joy of SUP Podcast

The link to Jo’s RGS talk is https://vimeo.com/543042015/3ffffec48e

The link to the Ikigai book’s Instagram @ikigaibook

The link to Lisa Nichol’s talk on storytelling and “the dip” https://youtu.be/Sl_65PK6rmE

Rosemary J Brown is a London-based journalist and author. An avid traveller, she is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Churchill Fellow.

In her quest to put female adventurers ‘back on the map’ she speaks at the Globetrotters Club, Women of the World festivals, Women's Institute and schools. She helped to organise the first-ever Heritage of Women in Exploration conference at the Royal Geographical Society.

Her book, Following Nellie Bly: Her Record-Breaking Race Around the World was published last month. Journalist Nellie Bly circled the world faster than anyone ever had in 1890. She travelled alone, with just a Gladstone bag, and shattered the fictional record of Phileas Fogg arriving back after 72 days. Awed by her achievement and shocked by its present-day obscurity, Rosemary set off to re-trace Bly's global journey 125 years later. Both of their journeys are captured in the book.

Rosemary volunteers for people seeking asylum, homeless people and community groups. She climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, plays in a ukulele band and escapes to her beloved hilltop village in France when she can. She has lived in Washington, DC, Florida and Paris, France.

The motto she tries to live by is: leap and the net will arrive. Unusual facts: she has no cavities, was married in a shelter for homeless women and named her daughter after a mountain.

We talk about her background, her sense of adventure, her wish to bring female adventurers to the forefront of modern exploration lore and her wish to change the world through her journalism and her charity work.

https://nelliebly125.wordpress.com/

Twitter: @Rosemary-Nellie

Instagram @rosemaryjbrown

For the bookstagram starting on 10th May 2021: @penswordbooks

Born and raised on a farm in the UK Squash Falconer is a record-breaking adventurer, speaker and presenter.

Combining her love of different sports Squash was the first British woman to climb and paraglide from the summit of Mont Blanc having ridden there from the UK on her motorbike.

Squash has climbed many mountains around the world, she has summited Mount Everest and holds claim to be the worlds highest ever bum boarder -a title she gained on Cho Oyu, the 6th highest mountain in the world.

In 2013 Squash completed a 3000mile journey on an ElliptiGO setting a new distance record for travel by Elliptical bicycle.

Squash has self-shot many of her trips and received accolade for the short films she’s produced.  In 2014 a project saw her ride thousands of miles through South America on her BMW GS 800 presenting an adventure travel documentary. 

Passionate about sharing her adventures, Squash has a unique and quirky outlook on life and firmly believes that with the right attitude every one of us can achieve our goals and dreams, or at least, something extraordinary.

The discussion is about mountains and how she found herself in that milieu, but it’s also about what the combination of her sports gives her. As with many of my “mountain guests” it’s often not what you think. It’s not about being an adrenaline seeking junkie, scaring yourself for kicks with near death experiences. It’s about the freedom you feel, about the empowerment that comes with finding how what it feels like to push your limits and find new depths to yourself.

We talk about the different approaches women and men take to adventure sometimes, about being comfortable in your own skin and how it is important not to just “do, do, do” all the time.

We also discuss her becoming a mum, and how the challenge of being a single mum in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) for 6 weeks was the hardest challenge she has ever faced but how she organised herself like she was on expedition on Everest to keep herself well and healthy so she could look after her tiny little girl better.

Believe in your crazy dreams, don’t let anyone stop you from trying and brand fatigue after telling her story so many times are some other themes we touch on!

www.squashfalconer.com
Facebook : squashfalconer 
Twitter : @squashfalconer
Instagram : squashfalconer

Frit Tam is a transgender Chinese adventurer and loves exploring the outdoors in as many ways as possible: climbing, hiking, skiing, cycling, paddleboarding and rollerblading.

As an adventure filmmaker and photographer with 10 years of shooting experience, he creates adventure films under his film studio, Passion Fruit Pictures, whose sole mission is to add diversity and colour to the adventure industry.

His latest adventure documentary, Brave Enough, has had multiple sold out screenings. In May 2021, he will be embarking on his latest adventure, Glide for Pride - a 2000km rollerblading and cycling trip across England to tackle the issue of belonging in the LGBTQ+ community.

You may have noticed different pronouns in these show notes to all the previous ones. This is because when I invited Frit to be on the podcast, he was identifying as a gay woman. By the time we did the interview he had come out as transgender.

Regardless of the pronouns, I really wanted to chat to Frit because I loved his story, I loved the passion with which he tell the stories of others who are grossly underrepresented in the outdoor adventure space.

And I wanted to hear about his latest mission to travel all over England by rollerblade and bike to raise awareness for the LGBTQIA+ community.

It’s a very open, vulnerable conversation and I am enormously grateful to Frit for taking the time to talk to me about a very personal journey.

We discuss two of his latest films, how “conquering” is the narrative in the adventure world that has stopped so many other amazing stories being told and how he wants to change this.

We talk about fitting in, about finding your place in life, about how to extend the reach of his projects so that people who may not otherwise have watched a film about a veiled Muslim hiker or a middle aged paddleboarding mum can see the shift in perspectives and learn something that broadens their views.

Frit’s #challengecatie is for me to make an adventure film here in the Alps. Ridiculously excited about that one!!

Instagram                                            @passionfruitpictures_

                                                            @frit_tam

LinkedIn                                              @fritsaritatam

Clubhouse                                           @frit_tam

Twitter                                                 @frit_tam

Facebook                                            https://www.facebook.com/glideforpride

FB group Skaters Gonna Skate           https://www.facebook.com/groups/1144920699262426/

Website                                               www.passionfruitpictures.co