Chatting to a Friend

Chatting to Jenny Graham

Jenny is a joy to chat to. Funny, self aware and full of Scottish banter. We recorded this epsiode about a million years ago but her book as just come out so it’s finally time to release the chat about teenage motherhood, growing up alongside her little boy and re-discovering her own passions. Heavily featured is the world record breaking round the world cycle which makes her the fastest woman to circumnavigate the planet on a bike. Instagram: @jennygrahamis_

Chatting to Amy Aed

Amy Aed walked the length of the Danube River. It was not the journey she planned. In fact, she hadn’t really planned at all so it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that there were ups and down, stops and re-starts. However, sometimes that makes for the best kind of adventures. Join me as I chat to her about setting off with grand expectations, managing injury and travelling as a woman in a same sex relationship in countries where that’s not yet the norm. Instagram: @wandering_everywhere

Chatting to Laura Collett MBE

Since recording this with Laura, more months ago than is polite to still not have published, she has gone on to win Badminton. Listen in though as we talk about early beginnings in horses, a life threatening accident and coming back to win gold at Tokyo 2021. Inspiring stuff! Instagram: @laura_collett

Chatting to Victoria Evans. Part 2

Listen as Victoria Evans relives her voyage across the Atlantic to become the Guinness World Record holder. Recorded quite some time ago, my apologies to Victoria for the delay, but I promise it’s worth the listen! Instagram: @seachangesport

Chatting to Preet Chandi

Preet Chandi was a tennis prodigy from a traditional British Punjabi family, living away from home from a very early age. She left school with very few qualifications, joined the army reserves without telling her family, got into university, became an officer in the regular army, got a masters and decided to go to the South Pole on her own. This is a two parter in one episode about the grit, determination and drive of an extraordinary woman. She would tell she’s not extraordinary, but I cha...

Chatting to Ursula Martin

Ursula Martin is also known as “One Woman Walks” after she walked thousands of miles across Wales and then across Europe.   Her Welsh walk started when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and our conversation takes us all over the place (literally) although actually we talk less about the logistical achievement of crossing Europe on foot during covid than how someone who needed a change of scenery took to adventure and never really looked back.   It’s a very personal conversation, ful...

Chatting to Cathy O'Dowd

South African mountaineer Cathy O’Dowd was the first woman in the world to climb Mount Everest from both sides. Her most challenging Himalayan epic was as part of team forging a new route on an 8000 metre peak. Her many expeditions provided extensive experience with individuals and teams facing stress, risk and overwhelming challenge. She developed these insights into a 25-year career as an internationally acclaimed corporate motivational speaker. Cathy remains an active adventurer. She ...

Chatting to Frankie Dewar

Freelance Social Media goto and lover of big days outside, Frankie Dewar is a climber, hiker, skier and general fun seeker Frankie has cycled 3,000km around the UK to interview people older than herself about the outdoors to show that you don't have to "do it whilst you're young". In this conversation, we cover everything from how the podcast came about to how she coped as a young carer to her mum and how she burst into her 20s tyring to make up for time “lost” during her childhood. How envy...

Chatting to Lucy Bartholomew

Running began for Lucy when she was 15 years old as a way to spend time with her Dad. When he decided to run a 100km race through the blue mountains 5 years ago she trained alongside him for every step of the way. On race day, she ran from place to place to see him and accidentally ran her first ultra. Then she decided that she wanted to complete a race of this distance and ran side by side with her Dad for 100Km, finishing in 12:36:00 and smiling. She was in love, not only with the physical...

Chatting to Elizabeth Healey

Elizabeth Healey has a PhD in Neurophysiology and in her twenties gave it all up to follow her dream. In the wake of having her first baby, she decided to go to drama school and has never looked back. Someone once said “Elizabeth Healey is the epitome of ‘portfolio’ when you think of a career – an actress (appearing in block buster movies like Marvel’s Dr Strange and indie gems like Across The River, a television reporter, radio host for JACK RADIO, podcaster, film director and screenwrit...

Chatting to Victoria Evans - part one

At the time of the episode release (January 2022) Victoria Evans is about to depart in February to become the 8th British woman to solo row the Atlantic Ocean. Setting off from Tenerife, she will row 3000 miles over the course of nearly two months to reach Port St Charles in Barbados. It’s a challenge that’s been 3 years in the making, with Victoria forced to postpone last minute at the start of 2021 due to COVID restrictions . It’s an endeavour she’s undertaking to raise awareness about, ...

Chatting to Monika Sattler

Originally from Germany, Monika moved after high school to the US to play volleyball for a university team. After an uncomfortable start at one college, she graduated from another with a summa cum laude and was accepted with a full scholarship to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. After graduation, she worked for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But she felt there was an inner urge that there was more than settling for a job she was not completely pas...

Chatting to Dot Bekker

At 58 Dot Bekker left an unhappy marriage determined that with her 35 plastic crates she would start life from scratch. At 60 she drove, on her own, through West Africa to return to the country of her birth, Zimbabwe. Since then, she has written a book about her journey, is raising scholarship funds for girls to ensure they escape early marriage and more and get into high school, she is collaborating with a water charity to bring much needed water to rural homes and developing opportunit...

Chatting to Tracie May

Born and raised in NY, Tracie May grew up being influenced by artist’s work she had the opportunity to encounter as a child. From Picasso’s Guernica to Basquiat, and the Egyptian exhibits of King Tutankhamun at the Met to Salvador Dali, and contemporary artists of the Whitney Biennial, she was exposed to a wide variety of creative geniuses starting at an early age.   Tracie knew as a child that she would become an artist with skills in multiple media. Upon graduating high school on Long...

Chatting to Caroline George

Caroline George is a passionate alpinist and internationally certified mountain guide who has worked and played all over the world with a penchant for ice climbing, in which she competed on the world cup circuit for three years.   She is a mother to a little girl, which has empowered her to use the mountains as a vector for more equality and inclusivity for future genretions. She was the guide for the Swiss Alpine Club’s first women expedition team and is currently the technical coordinat...

Chatting to Belinda Kirk

Belinda Kirk is an explorer and the leading campaigner promoting the benefits of adventure on wellbeing.   She is the author of the first book to explain why adventure is essential for our wellbeing: 'Adventure Revolution'. The life-changing power of choosing challenge. It’s the first book to explain why adventure is essential to wellbeing. Drawing on lessons learnt from leading groups into the wilderness and the latest findings in neuroscience and psychology, Belinda shows how adventure ...

Chatting to Sunny Lawrence

Sunny Jo Lawrence is a Utah native and has a college degree from Utah Valley University in the field of Psychology. She married James Lawrence (the Iron Cowboy) in December of 2000. They have five children: four daughters and one son. She has always loved being a mum, as well as James’ #1 supporter through all his accomplishments. Sunny has been an athlete for most years of her life and has enjoyed the calmed down version now that she is entering the next chapter of life.  She is perhaps ...

Chatting to Jane Harries

Jane Harries is a “soft” adventurer, a magazine editor, a former lawyer and a survivor of a prophylactic double mastectomy that went horribly awry.   She has travelled the world doing adventures including the Camino de Santiago, the Marathon des Sables, crossing the Karakorum Highway and white water rafting in the Zambeze river, settling in Australia for many years.   She qualified for the Ironman 70.3 World Championships by accident (hear the full story in the interview), is a fierce ad...

Chatting to Ingrid Mackinnon

Originally from Canada, Ingrid Mackinnon is a dancer, movement director, choreographer and teacher.   Her movement direction credits include Regents Park, Royal Shakespeare Company, Arcola Theatre and Lyric. She teaches at dance and actor movement at schools such as Guildhall, Mountview and Royal Central School of Speech & Drama.   As a performer her credits include Dallas Black Dance Theater and Disney’s The Lion King in the west end. She has an MA in Movement: Direction & Teaching fr...

Season 1 Guest Bibliography

Thanks to my incredible guests for putting pen to paper and producing some incredbile books! Click on the link below for the full bibliogrpahy. Click here for Guest Bibliography, Chatting to a Friend - Season 1

Chatting to Jenny Wordsworth

Jenny Davis is a lawyer turned professional athlete. She spends her time travelling the globe to compete in some of the world’s toughest races, events and expeditions. Most recently she completed a solo and unassisted trek to the South Pole. For the last 100km, she was suffering from polar thigh, a condition that caused her flesh to start to rot and caused her unimaginable pain. Despite this she refused to be medivac’d out and persevered. Our conversation ranges from this particular exped...

Chatting to Veronica Rojas

Chatting to Cath Wallis

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 w...

Chatting to Mimi Anderson

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 wi...

Chatting to Rea Kolbl, Martina Valmassoi and Grace Staberg

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...

Chatting to Annabel Abbs

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....

Chatting to Emily Woodhouse

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 ...

Chatting to Jo Moseley

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...

Chatting to Rosemary Brown

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 ...

Chatting to Squash Falconer

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 t...

Chatting to Frit Tam

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 scre...

Chatting to Elspeth Beard

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 th...

Chatting to Baz Moffat

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 wa...

Chatting to Jo Bradshaw

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 ...

Chatting to Bev Logan

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) call...

Chatting to Alice Morrison

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 ...

Chatting to Chemmy Alcott

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 se...

Chatting to Sarah Williams

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 explo...

Chatting to Dr Phoebe Sneddon

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: fun...

Chatting to Niki Doeg and Frances Davies

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 ch...

Chatting to Libby Jackson

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 d...

Chatting to Nikki Scott

In 2009, Nikki Scott BEM was 28 with two children under 5 when she got the knock on the door that every military wife dreads. Her 26 year old husband, Lee, had been killed in Afghanistan and she was suddenly a widow, with no home of her own and a piece of her heart ripped out. Over the next few months, she barely survived, watching her 5 year old son shrink into a shadow of his former self until, on an enforced family holiday, she saw him smile and laugh with his cousins and she realised s...

Chatting to Nikki Scott BEM

In 2009, Nikki Scott BEM was 28 with two children under 5 when she got the knock on the door that every military wife dreads. Her 26 year old husband, Lee, had been killed in Afghanistan and she was suddenly a widow, with no home of her own and a piece of her heart ripped out. Over the next few months, she barely survived, watching her 5 year old son shrink into a shadow of his former self until, on an enforced family holiday, she saw him smile and laugh with his cousins and she realised s...

Chatting to Victoria Bagnall

Do you know or are you someone who struggles to get started on a task, gets easily distracted, is always excited by the “next exciting thing”, who is constantly late, losing things, who finds it difficult to keep their emotions controlled, does not seem to have a very flexible approach to life or does not seem to really understand themselves or how they are functioning? It could be that they are struggling with their Executive Functions. These functions are what allow us to execute our live...

Chatting to Shasta Nelson

Shasta Nelson is a leading expert on Friendship. She’s been quoted in magazines and newspapers, online and print, including New York Times, The Washington Post, and Readers Digest, and has been interviewed live on over dozens of TV shows, including the TODAY Show and Steve Harvey Show. Plus, if you haven’t yet seen her popular TEDx talk then you’ll want to watch that later! Her previous books include Friendships Don’t Just Happen! which is a guide for making new friends as an adult, and Fri...

Chatting to Rosie Aiello

After a 25-year relationship, Rosie Aiello, engineered an international escape from the Middle East to save her young adult daughter and herself from domestic violence. Stunned by PTSD and nearly mentally destroyed, she reinvented herself since arriving back in the United States, started her own business, and became a speaker, best-selling co-author and an international awarding-winning entrepreneur. And found the “kind” love of her life. With her Freedom Fulfillment Foundation system,...

Chatting to Mandy Hickson

Getting the new year off to a flying start (pun fully intended) with the RAF’s 2nd ever female fast jet pilot, Mandy Hickson. Think Top Gun with British accents and you’re right on the money! Mandy’s book, “An Officer, Not a Gentleman”, is a cracking read, charting her flying career from Air Training Corps as a teenager, via the years of intense training to 3 tours in Iraq and the latter years “flying a desk”. In this highly entertaining chat, we cover much of that plus men’s mental health...

Chatting to Jill and Irene about 30 years of friendship

In my most personal episode yet, I chat to my two best friends from university. In October 2020, despite the utter nonsense the world was going through, the three of us celebrated (in different countries, sadly) 30 years of friendship. In this episode, we go back to how and when we met, first impressions and a quick whizz through the highlights of our time at St Andrews. We then move on to how we ended up doing what we do, how lack of solid plans seem to have led us to pretty good lives. W...

Chatting to Jacki Hill-Murphy

Jacki Hill-Murphy has spent the last 10 years researching female explorers of the 18th and 19th centuries and recreating their expeditions. She does so as faithfully as possible, at the same time of year with similar forms of transport where possible. This episode is a little different to the others, because as well as the incredible adventures and journeys Jacki goes on, part of the fascination for me was in the stories of these women. In an era where they had almost no rights of their o...

Chatting to Laura Penhaul

Laura Penhaul is two-time Guiness World Record holding ocean rower, physiotherapist and performance manager for high performing athletes. She was the team leader of the Coxless Crew, setting two World Records in January 2016 as they rowed unsupported across the Pacific for 9,000km from California to Cairns. It took 4 years to prepare for the challenge and 9 months to complete it. Laura has supported athletes through Vancouver, London and Rio Paralympic Games and previously was Lead Physiot...