Chatting to a Friend

In 1982 at the age of twenty three Elspeth Beard set off on a solo trip to ride her 1974 R60/6 BMW motorcycle around the world. The journey took two and a half years, covering 35,000 miles. She set off alone with no sponsorship or support, in an age before email, mobile phones and satnavs and it was not until 2008 that she discovered that she had become the first British woman to ride a motorcycle around the world.

In 2008 BMW commissioned and published a short article about the round the world trip for BMW International and as a result of this her story gradually spread.

In 2015 she decided to write a book about the adventure and her book ‘Lone Rider’ was published in the UK in 2017.

We talk about how little interest anyone really had in her trip, before, during and after and how she felt about that.

We talked about resilience, stubbornness and determination in the face of accidents, robberies and even a miscarriage.

We discuss how she managed her money and how she dealt with many many unwanted threats to her personal safety.

There is a poignant and vivid theme throughout the book of a young woman discovering herself and how to understand love, with a tangled love story mixed in with the girls’ own adventure stories.

The chat comes almost to an end with us talking about how this formative trip helped to shape the rest of her life, giving her the confidence to take on anything and everything.

And finally, we discuss who should play her in the movie. Sadly, we’re both too out of touch to know anyone currently able to play a very tall, very bold 23 year old biking pioneer. Answers on a postcard, please!

www.elspethbeard.com

https://www.brand.bmw-motorrad.com/en/experience/stories/adventure/elspeth-beard.html

Instagram:       @elspethbeard

Warning: some subjects may be a little adult for very young listeners. It’s all important information but adults should decide how much they want to explain to their kids depending on their age.

This is a podcast for everyone! If you are a woman in sport, a man or a woman who trains women and girls and/or if you have daughters, you should listen to this. It’s mind blowing and life changing, I promise you.

Baz Moffat began rowing at the age of 21 to meet new friends. Four years later she was sitting on the start line of the GB trials. She later made the Women’s 8 and won a medal at the 2007 World Championships.

Her greatest weapon in sport was probably her mind-over-matter approach, a performance mentality which got her into the boat, onto the team and up on the podium. It pushed her body to do things nobody believed it could or should. She, by her own admission, naively assumed this mentality was an asset that would help her in life.

When she retired from pro sport she was handed a fairly brutal reality check.  In ‘normal’ life, she still believed her best tool was the ‘eyes-on-the-prize’, and ‘just-push-through’ approach. But you can’t master life like that and her body began to rebel.

She had a sudden realisation that it wasn’t all about body; she needed to broaden her mind too. She found she had to harmonise mind and body, instead of seeing one as master of the other.

As she began to see life through a new lens, the outputs were so significant she began to introduce new thinking and techniques into her coaching work.

In this conversation, we discuss her sporting background, her time in the GB Rowing Squad, her brutal first labour and birth, followed by therapy and her empowered life changing second birth.

Then we talk about journey into being a pelvic floor specialist that led her to her newest iteration as co-founder of The Well HQ with Dr Emma Ross and Dr Bella Smith and their absolute mission in life to change the way that women stay healthy, get involved and stay in sport and how everyone involved in a woman’s sporting life – from herself to her dad to her coach and the schools and clubs she belongs to – can make it the glorious, empowering journey it’s supposed to be.

We talk about sports bras, periods, menopause, science, sporting environments and SO MUCH MORE!!

The Well HQ founders are writing a book called “Train Like a Woman” and while it has no release date yet, you can sign up on their website for updates as to when that is likely to happen.

https://www.thewell-hq.com/ They run regular webinars, some free, some paid. They have courses for both interested women and for coaches and trainers.

Don’t forget to listen in to the end for this week’s #challengecatie (which is actually a life long challenge – can you guess what it is?)

Instagram        @thewell_hq

Twitter            @thewellhq

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

LinkedIn          @thewellhq

Baz’s accounts:

http://www.bazmoffat.com/

Instagram        @bazmoffatstrongtothecore

Twitter            @bazmoffat

Facebook        @BazMoffatStrongtotheCore 

LinkedIn          http://linkedin.com/in/baz-moffat-55b61a11

In 2004 Jo Bradshaw was a Business Advisor for Business Link in Buckinghamshire, living a very normal, risk free, comfort loving and safe life.

Over the next 3 years she took part in three cycle challenges, finally being offered a role as challenge crew by Discover Adventure (DA) which she did during my annual leave. In late 2007 DA offered her a job in their offices near Salisbury running the Open Challenges and life since then has never been the same.

She moved the 120 miles from Bucks to Wiltshire in early 2008, halving her salary, selling her fancy 4x4, renting out her house and went from suits and business events to jeans, walking boots and a new way of life.

She worked at DA for two years, leading many a trip over and above the office work and gaining invaluable experience. The office job was getting too busy to allow me out and about so she left the safety of a regular income and went freelance in 2010, gaining her Mountain Leader qualification and headed off into them there hills!

Her job title is now Outdoor Instructor and Expedition Leader and since going self-employed she have now led 35+ expeditions on Kilimanjaro along with numerous other expeditions on foot, two wheels and horseback, most at high altitude, all around the world with both charity and private clients.

In the UK she teaches and assesses the expedition element of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award from Bronze through to Gold as well as leading many a challenge on bike and foot in the UK and Europe. She also helps to deliver corporate team building events and expedition training weekends as well as public speaking about her experiences before she discovered the outdoors, Everest, the earthquake and beyond to corporates, schools and groups.

She never thought she would ever summit Snowdon even once let alone any other mountains. Becoming the 3rd British woman to reach the true summit of Manaslu (the world’s 8th highest mountain,) standing at 8163m in September 2013 and then being the 36th British woman to reach the summit of Everest in May 2016 have been huge and unexpected achievements.

She has gone from having severe vertigo and a great ability to say no way too often to facing her fears, saying yes more and turning my life around. She is now en route to complete the 7 summits and continue to raise funds and awareness for children’s mental health charity Place2Be.

This is a great chat about life before realising how adventurous and resilient she could be, to talking about challenges big and small. How do we learn to know how to push ourselves but know where the line is between safety and possible danger to life?

We talk about the seven summits on seven continents challenge and how she got to be that person. Jo is funny and interesting, the chat is peppered with musings and advice on finding out how to be your own champion, growing in experience and confidence and enjoying the journey as much as the end goal.

https://www.jobradshaw.co.uk/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jo-bradshaw-89b13885/

https://www.facebook.com/jobradshawadventurer/

https://www.instagram.com/_jobradshaw/

I totally stole this from Bev’s website because it’s way better than anything I could write about her.

What it doesn’t tell you is that Bev started this amazing community called Badass Mother Runners when she was in the depths of depression and in a really bad place. She took her misfortune, turned it around and used it to help other people.

She’s a very modest human dynamo and the community she has founded reflects that.

“Once upon a time there was a princess (okay… a tired mother) called Bev, who in 2016, discovered running at the very young age of um… 34.

After completing the epic quest that is ‘Couch to 5k’ (much to hers and her family’s astonishment!) she was completely bitten by the running bug! Fast forward 3 years and 9 half marathons later she… got injured. Now, Princess Bev did not get herself a running injury, no, she managed to tear a hip muscle picking up a folder from a shelf… oh the glamour!

With no running Bev got bored pretty quick. With a background in brand management and social media (but recently having been let go by her wicked ex boss) she sat at her kitchen table weeping and said to her one true love (handsome prince Christof)… “I wanna start an online community for running mums! We are all far too down on ourselves, it’s a bit shit! I want to make a safe place for mums to encourage each other that's maybe, on occasion, a little bit sweary. I want to call this magical place the ‘Badass Mother Runners Club’ (Because again it sounds a bit sweary and makes me smile). We will remind mums that they are totally BADASS and doing an amazing job, despite what they might think! Is that a really silly idea??? Pour me another wine please!”

But… handsome prince Christof said “why not have a go! (& here’s your wine fair maiden)”. So she did just that in November 2018!

And it grew, and grew, and the support for each other of the women who joined was awe inspiring! Then a couple of months in when people asked for hoody’s and so the ‘Mama got Merch’ range was born…. and they all lived happily ever after! (Because they had running, new friends and cool shit to wear!)”

Find Bev and the BAMRs here:

https://www.badassmotherrunners.co.uk/

Www.Facebook.com/badassmotherrunners

Www.Instagram.com/badass_mother_runners_club

Twitter @motherrunners 

They’re also on Strava too!

Alice Morrison is an adventurer and an explorer. She travels to the furthest places on earth and walks through its toughest habitats. She has been described as ‘Indiana Jones for girls’. Her aim is to bear witness to what is happening to the planet as our climate and our society changes and to tell the stories that bring we humans together rather than the ones that drive us apart.

Alice was was born in 1963 in Edinburgh. Six weeks later, her parents boarded a ship and sailed to Africa. For the first 8 years of her life, she ran free in the African Bush, roaming around the foothills of the Mountains of the Moon in Uganda, hunting tadpoles and running away from snakes.

At the age of 11, it was back to Scotland to St Denis and Cranley Academy for Young Ladies,  followed by Edinburgh University, where she studied Arabic and Turkish. She spent six memorable months living in Damascus and then after university lived for two years in Cairo, teaching English and exploring the country.

Moving to London, she pursued a career in journalism which had started in Dubai at “What’s On in Dubai”. From there to Middle East Broadcasting, the original Arabic Satellite News Station.  The next step was to BBC News with jobs on BBC World TV and then BBC Arabic TV.  She went on to become co-Editor for the BBC News Channel output between 10 am and 8 pm.

For the new millennium she moved North to Manchester and onto the internet with Supanet where she built the ISP’s content from six pages to one million pages in two years. She also started to break out into mini adventures squeezed into the holidays: the Snowdon Challenge, crossing Costa Rica coast to coast, Kilimanjaro, ice climbing in the Andes, climbing the Ruwenzoris….

In 2002, she plunged into public service when she was appointed as CEO of Vision+Media, a quango dedicated to growing the creative industries in the Northwest and remained there for nine years. With a change in government policy, she was made redundant and left the rat race for a bike race.

She entered the Tour D’Afrique and raced her bike from Cairo to Cape Town: 12,500km through ten countries in 100 days with 20 days rest.

Bitten with the adventure bug, she entered the Marathon Des Sables, the toughest footrace on earth, 6 marathons across the Sahara in 6 days carrying all your own food and equipment. As a self-confessed “terrible runner” who had never even run a marathon, she decided to give herself the best possible chance by moving to Morocco in January 2014 to train in the sand and sun.

She loved Morocco so much she stayed and committed to her heart’s desire of becoming a full time adventurer.

In 2015 she did her first “world first” with the Atlas to Atlantic Trek, sponsored by Epic Travel. She and her expedition guide, Rachid Aitelmahjoub, became the first people ever to hike from the highest point in North Africa, Mount Toubkal (4167m) to the Atlantic Ocean (Agadir) straight across the Atlas Mountains.

She has also run the Everest Trail Race, became the first woman to Draa River in Morocco and then decided to walk across the whole of Morocco with three Berber companions and six camels!

We talk about her childhood, her career, her love of languages, the change in direction to become an adventurer, how one grows as a person in the face of adversity and lots more. I could have carried on talking to her for hours, but all good things must come to an end!!

You can find Alice in all the following places and her books are available on Amazon or through her website.

Web: www.alicemorrison.co.uk  

Podcast: Alice in Wanderland

Twitter: aliceoutthere1

Instagram: aliceoutthere1            

Fbook: Alice Hunter Morrison Adventures

As a 4 x Winter Olympian, a career high ranking of 8th in the World, 7 x British National Overall Champion and the only British female skier to ever win a run in a World Cup, Chemmy Alcott is widely regarded as one of Britain’s greatest ever skiers.

In a time when competing at a Winter Olympics was unusual for a British athlete, Chemmy defied the odds and pioneered a skiing movement that has inspired a generation. Resulting in not just skiers, but British Winter Sport athletes as a whole seeing the Winter Olympics as a realistic and achievable goal.

Since retiring from competing on the world stage after The Sochi Olympics in 2014, Chemmy has immersed herself in the world of TV & media, where commentates on the World Cup Ski Series for Eurosport amongst being a guest on many other shows. Furthermore, she competed in ITV Dancing on Ice in 2012, where she finished 5th.

Most recently, she became one of the lead presenters of Ski Sunday, alongside Ed Leigh.

We talk about her childhood, her racing career highs and lows, her struggles with motherhood in the early days and trying to juggle it with a blossoming presenting career.

The lows from severe injury, from losing her mum very suddenly and most recently, from online abuse at the hand of cowardly, anonymous trolls, have given Chemmy a fairly thick skin and a resilience she shouldn’t need to have.

It has, however, stood her in good stead and combined with her 96mph skiing and her 100mph personality, she is inspiring young women to give their all to whatever it is they are passionate about. To really care and to not be embarrassed about having goals and dreams and drive.

Her new challenge has her ski touring and climbing up three 4000m peaks in Switzerland as part of an initiative by My Switzerland to encourage all women teams to climb all 48 of them between 8th March and 8th September. More info here: https://peakchallenge.myswitzerland.com/en/

You can follow Chemmy in the following places:

www.chemmyalcott.com

IG:                   @chemmyski

Twitter:           @chemmyski (BE NICE!)

After working in finance for 8 years, feeling “grey and tired”, Sarah Williams quit her city job and spent 18 months travelling the world, climbing Kilimanjaro, backpacking around South America and doing a ski season in Verbier.

She used this time to help her decide on what she wanted to do with her life. She set up Tough Girl Challenges as a way of motivating and inspiring women and girls. She is the host the Tough Girl Podcast where she has interviewed over 300 inspirational female explorers, adventurers, athletes and everyday women who have overcome great challenges.

The Tough Girl Podcast has been downloaded over 1.5 Million times in 174 countries. It won the Women’s Sport Trust, Media Initiative of the Year Award in May 2018 and the She Extreme best adventure podcast in 2019.

Sarah completed the Marathon des Sables (6 marathons in 6 days across the Sahara desert) in April 2016 and in 2017 she thru hiked the Appalachian Trail (2,190 miles) in 100 days! 

She completed her Masters in Women & Gender studies at Lancaster University in 2018 and cycled the Pacific Coast Highway and Baja California solo and unsupported (over 4,000 km).

For me personally, this is possibly one of my most inspiring chats to date. Sarah feels more like me than many of the women I have interviewed and I could relate so much to her need for adventure, her desire to inspire and motivate women to get out and live their one life to the full.

She is infectious with her positivity, her drive and her generosity of spirit. I took so much from this conversation. Not just what she has learned from her incredible guests (as I do every week) but from her own adventures into the pain cave, delving deep to find out what we’re made of.

Listen to this and then binge listen to her incredible podcast. You can become part of Sarah’s Tough Girl Challenges tribe through the following links:

✩Twitter - https://twitter.com/_tough_girl

✩ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/toughgirlchallenges/  

✩ Blog/Website - https://www.toughgirlchallenges.com/  

✩ FaceBook - https://www.facebook.com/ToughGirlChallenges/  

✩ Pinterest - https://uk.pinterest.com/Tough101/  

✩ Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/ToughGirlPodcast?ty=h

✩YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/SarahWilliamsToughGirlChallenges  

You can listen to the Tough Girl Podcast on the go via iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify & Stitcher!

Sarah has also written three books and you can find them here:

https://www.toughgirlchallenges.com/books

Dr Phoebe Sneddon is a paediatric registrar in the NHS.

She’s a mum to four year old daughter.

She’s also a cyclocross racer for Team Magspeed and a Specialized ambassador.

She is passionate about everyone (especially children, young people and women) finding something they love doing, to improve mental health, to give joy and to give something other than likes on social media to think about.

I found Phoebe to be exactly as I had expected she would be from following her on Instagram: funny, authentic, self-deprecating, passionate about her job, her sport and her patients and bit cross about the state of the UK (and not afraid to say so).

We talk about her childhood being keen but “a bit rubbish” at sport, to her dismal attempts to be a soldier in Officer Training Corps at university and how she wishes sport could be a bit less competitive sometimes so that nobody felt embarrassed or worried about having a go.

She cares deeply about her patients and their lives, worries how children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds will get the support they need to find something they love, take up a sport or get out of the cycle they are often in.

She talks proudly about her family history of doctors, how she came to be a paediatrician and how she kind of just fell into bike racing because her then boyfriend (now soon to be ex-husband) was a racer and she thought “it didn’t look too hard”.

As a Specialized ambassador, she encourages women to get on their bikes and just give it a go, to help with self-confidence, body image, mental health and realising they have so much more within themselves.

We finish by talking about the big, scary ride she planned and executed to raise money for a friend’s new wheelchair and how privileged she always feels riding her bike when she knows so many people are not as lucky.

You can follow Phoebe on:

 IG:                   @snedatron

Twitter:           @snedatron

Website:         https://phoebesneddon.wordpress.com/

 #challengecatie

In a new addition to the podcast, I am asking my guests to set me a challenge within their area of expertise.

Phoebe challenged me to ride my bike to the top of a very steep hill (I live in the Alps so I have plenty of choice) as soon as the snow has melted and then ride it again at the end of the summer to see how much faster I am!

Challenge accepted. You can follow the hashtag on social media and follow me on Strava if you fancy it.

Niki Doeg and Frances Davies were half of the crew known as Yorkshire Rows, who rowed across the Atlantic as part of the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge in 2015.

They subsequently wrote a book called “Four Mums in a Boat”, charting their journey from Saturday morning river rowing novices to full blown Ocean rowers.

It is a story of the highs and lows, the mum guilt, the juggling of jobs, families, training, insane amounts of organisation, fund raising and finally the row itself.

The chat is fun and funny. These two middle aged women regularly reminded me of my own girlfriends, trying to carve out precious time for themselves amongst all the noise and busy- ness of life.

We chat about the importance of just saying YES. Even if you feel you’d be no good at it, the slowest, the last, the least “natural” at it.

Saying yes to an adventure led them to finding their truest selves as well as best friends who became like family.

If you want to be inspired to step out of your comfort zone in order to achieve something great, then listen to these women.

Then read their incredible book and laugh and cry your way across the Atlantic with them.

Just brilliant.

Libby Jackson is one of Britain’s leading experts in human spaceflight, having spent over a decade working at the forefront of the field.

Space was a childhood passion and after completing degrees in physics at Imperial College and astronautics and space engineering at Cranfield University, she has worked in the space industry ever since.

Libby spent seven years working at the European Space Agency’s Mission Control for the International Space Station in a number of roles including her dream job as a Columbus Flight Director.

She played a key role in Tim Peake’s mission to the International Space Station and continues to work in the field.

Libby is a frequent contributor on television and radio, including Stargazing Live, The Big Think: Should We Go To Mars? and Astronauts: Do You Have What It Takes?

Accompanied by my first ever co-host, my 10 year old daughter, Amélie, we spent a brilliant hour chatting with Libby about space, her earliest recollections of being fascinated with it and followed by some heart in mouth stories from mission control.

We discussed how space is such a huge industry now that there are so many ways for young people to get in and how annoying it still is that there are blue and pink aisles in toy shops.

Why is mission control such a quiet, almost spiritual, place that fills us with such awe and excitement? How does the extensive training prepare you for all eventualities?

And the moral of Libby’s tale – ALWAYS ask the question, the answer might be no but if you don’t ask you will never know if it could have been yes. 

Seize every opportunity that comes your way and find what it is you love and drive towards it full steam ahead!

Libby is passionate about sharing stories of human spaceflight and encouraging young people to follow their passions in life. Her first book, A Galaxy of Her Own: Amazing Stories of Women in Space was published in 2017 and Space Explorers: 25 Extraordinary Stories of Space Exploration and Adventure was published in 2020.

We have a copy of the first book and it is fascinating, supremely interesting and beautifully illustrated – the next one is firmly on Amélie’s birthday list!

You can follow Libby on:

Twitter:           libbyjackson__

IG:                   libbyjackson__

Facebook:     Libby Jackson

Website:         www.libbyjackson.com (where you can order her awesome books)