Vicki Anstey

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0:49Hello and welcome to The Midpoint. My guest today has had a proper midlife epiphany. What she thought was the life she needed, the one her family expected for her marriage and a settled job, turned out not to be the life she enjoyed. I first met her when she was in the first throes of coming to the end of the first life as a student in her bar class in Richmond. She was very good at it. But she felt the need to confront fears and her own limits. She'd given up a successful corporate career to do something she felt passionate about. And then she signed up for a reality show, not just any show. She actually ended up being one of the first women to reach the final stages of Channel 4's SAS Who Dares Wins in 2018.

1:30By now, she had an appetite to keep pushing herself mentally and physically, overcoming fears. And since then, she's become a double world record holder rower, an adventurer, award winning entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, stress resilience coach and a well-being expert. And now an author. Vicky Anstey is one hell of a woman. Her new book, Other People Are Like the Weather, tells the story of how she rebuilt her life from the inside out and why the fears we try hardest to avoid might be the very things that set us free. So there's plenty to chat to Vicky about. Vicky, welcome to The Midpoint. Thank you for having me, Gabby.

2:09It's great to be here. We have a lot to talk about. I have dipped into your book, which I've referred to in your introduction today. and it feels like the coming together your book of so many things and and you've learned so much about yourself through your midlife experiences I think so it's really relevant to our audience who might be wanting to make big changes wondering how they can attempt what seem to be huge moments and decisions in their life yeah um it's kind of been a journey of as you say like becoming myself really and it's absolutely absolutely not how I saw my life paying out which you articulate so well in the early part of the book and you talk really candidly about your family and almost the constraints with which your kind of childhood held on you and one of the things that I felt really sad about was the young Vicky feeling she was a difficult child yeah yeah I definitely grew up with that sort of label attached to me and I think in some ways you know that's self-perpetuating isn't it you hear that you're difficult and perhaps you live up to that a bit although you know I'd constantly be in my childhood searching for the evidence to back up was I really a difficult child or did I just not fit in and and I think you know over the years I sort of realized that actually the latter is really the case and um yeah there was just something in side of me from a very early age that felt that that wasn't the life that I was designed for.

3:48It sounds like this, I'm missing out a huge sentence here, like Vicky set fire to her school. I mean, you were, you didn't appear to be doing anything extraordinary at that point. I mean, we'll get onto the extraordinary stuff you've done in the latter half of your life, but you didn't appear to be doing anything terrible or you weren't badly behaved, but there was, there was a friction between you and your mum from quite a young age. And a lot of that you, You trace back to an incident in the car, actually, that happened, a near fatal collision your family had. Yeah. And it's something that I go into quite deeply.

4:20There's sort of a thread of psychology through the book, actually. And, you know, I've done a lot of therapy myself in the writing of the book. And I sort of also do a lot of coaching in my own professional work and come to really understand that a lot. of things that happen to us in life are the consequence of, I guess, events that happen to other people and the projection of those events. Hence the title of the book. Hence the title of the book, Other People That Are Like the Weather. And that particular event was significant, I think, at the time, but became significant in terms of the ongoing ripple effect, the impact on my life.

5:07and I think to some extent the relationship that I had and continue to have with my mum. So yeah, they were in a car and my mum was actually pregnant with me, my sister was a toddler and my mum and dad were driving back, I think from a family holiday in the dark and my mum was driving and something woke my dad up and he reached for the steering wheel and realised that there was a guy in a car coming head on to them on the motorway, not on the other side of the road. And, you know, amazing near miss, quite a traumatic event for both of them, really. But my mum suffered from whiplash as a result of that.

5:51And one of my earliest memories is that, you know, if I fell over as a child, my mum couldn't or wouldn't pick me up because she had neck ache or back ache as a consequence of this accident. and of course as a child you don't know that you don't connect the dots how could you um and it's again one of the key themes of the book is about openly sharing our experiences having a voice sharing our stories um connecting more understanding one another's um you know backgrounds past experiences, past experiences, traumas potentially, and lifting the lid on those so that maybe we can have better relationships with each other through understanding of where those patterns come from.

6:44One of the other things about your family dynamic, I think, as well, which feeds into some of the things that you have done, the incredible things you've done later in your life, is fear. And fear wasn't something to be confronted or talked about. It was to be contained. It was better to make kind of life a little bit safer and smaller than to have a go. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there were lots of little fears around me as I grew up. And one of the, I suppose, one of the bigger ones, again, is something that I tell the story of in my, I think the first chapter of the book about a near drowning incident that I had as a child, which is a difficult thing because I was six years old and that's a long time ago so it's kind of hard to try and piece the memories back together but you know it still remains definitely in my in the back of my memory where my sister and I were in a lake in the New Forest on a holiday with my parents and they were kind of setting up a picnic on the the bank of the lake and we'd gone in to paddle around and then suddenly got out of our depth and I couldn't swim um my sister could a bit I think but just the panic that ensued meant that my gut reaction was to pull her under the water to get myself above water and to be able to take in air um and my recollection is that she then had to do the same back to me understandably and you know obviously I'm still here to this day So it was my sister, my dad pulled this out and everyone was fine.

8:22But it left me with a lifelong fear of water. And actually what I discovered through doing cognitive behavioral therapy was that my real fear wasn't about drowning. It was about harming someone else. So when I came to do my Pacific Row, which we might talk about in a minute, that was a process that I had to go through to unlock what that fear really was about. So it is a really key theme in the book. and something that, again, I think should be spoken about more so we can understand where those little fears come from. Yeah, if you're scared of harming someone, you're probably going to be a bit of a people pleaser.

8:59You're probably going to do things that you might not really want to do. And that feeds in quite a bit to what your... Self-editing and... Well, the path of your life took, which was quite orthodox. I'm going to get married and I'm going to have a corporate job and I'm going to do the things that are expected. These things are expected of me. This is what my family wants me to do. And it's not to say that you didn't love your husband, but you were going down a path that felt like the one that everybody wanted you on. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a combination, isn't it, of family and society and schooling structures and just systems that surround all of us.

9:35You know, and I think one of the most radical things any of us can do in our lives is just to become ourselves, is to find out what life we really want to live and then live it. And I think for so much of my life, really, until I was almost 40, I was living a life according to what I thought others expected of me. And even according to the narrative that other people had of me that I don't actually think was really the real me. And what a waste of a life that would be if I hadn't realised. And you appeared to have nice moments in your marriage. And, you know, you met somebody who did appear to cherish you and gave you confidence and actually helped you to break off from your corporate life by encouraging you because you found the Lottie Burke technique.

10:27You found bar, which is where I met you. So I kind of come in at this point in your life and see you as a bar instructor in Richmond, not knowing this previous corporate Vicky. You know, you hadn't had a life of physical kind of well-being, had you, at this point? No, not at all. My professional career started off in advertising and I'd studied French at university and that's where I met my ex-husband and I was 19. So we were together in total for 20 years, which is a really long time. That's a long marriage. I mean, I know you weren't married the whole time, but that's a big relationship. um yeah and you know I I think people change don't they over periods of time like that and I definitely did and I and I do think that that presented something of a challenge to him and um you know as you as you know you've alluded there was that um shift in my career path away from the corporate world into setting up my own fitness business um which sort of came about really because I had a moment of reckoning with myself at my computer screen late one night and realised that I needed to make some changes, that I wasn't happy.

11:32And I think there are lots of layers to why that might have been the case. But addressing the lifestyle that I was leading in advertising at the time, which is quite hedonistic and quite tiring, was was seemed to be the immediate thing to do. And then I sort of fell into exercise, really. And it's almost like peeling an onion at this point I think that's the first layer off isn't it I've broken away from the corporate life and there'll be people listening who think oh that's all I want to do I don't you know the rest of what's to come in your incredible journey might not they might not need that yeah but that in itself is a really bold brave move yeah and confronting one of the fears because even though your family didn't seem to be kind of always congratulating and celebrating your success in your corporate life that was more they could understand that yes that's contained yes yeah Yeah, absolutely.

12:21And then, of course, I do this huge U-turn. And it's so interesting, isn't it, how we make what feel like these sort of smallish decisions that turn into kind of potentially life changing moments. And really, I started doing what was then called Lottie Burke that I kind of, you know, created into this version of bar through my business that you obviously were very much part of. um I I did that because I wanted to reclaim some of my time I did it to set up a boundary at work at the time that I would leave work two nights a week at six o 'clock in order to take this class that I'd fallen in love with and you know and then of course it just has this huge kind of knock-on effect into every other area of my life and I transformed myself physically and emotionally and in lots of other ways did you think that would be enough at that point did you think this is it this is the thing that I've been searching for this is this is going to make me feel yeah kind of I am Vicky this is the person I'm meant to be I don't even know if I thought that at the time I think it was literally just uh I probably should move my body a bit and um this is a really good excuse to leave the office on time not even early but on time um twice a week and then I just fell in love with it and it was like reclaiming a part of myself that I hadn't I didn't even know was there at the time which now when I look back just seems I can't imagine you having a sedentary life that's I mean and I did and I think in a way that was a huge shift in my marriage at the time you know that wasn't the person that he'd married necessarily and then I think of course the physical resilience tips easily doesn't it into emotional mental resilience and I suddenly started seeing things I think for what they were and um and and then I think perhaps his behaviors changed in response to that as well so it's certainly not to say that the whole 20 years was miserable because that's absolutely not the case but it just reached a point that I couldn't tolerate you had any longer renewed physical fortitude and that was feeding into mental fortitude as well so you had the courage yeah that it took at that point just challenging certain things that I think I'd always accepted um and starting to see through the um constructed complexities of the life that we were living you know and he took control of my business and I didn't have my own bank account and you know all these things that I look back on now actually were to be completely truthful embarrassment that I'd let that become the case um um but you know when you're in a relationship for that length of time you just think this is normal and it's a model that my parents lived by as well and so then you know that felt like familiar and acceptable um but yeah just over time certain things kind of crept in and I started questioning them and daring to do that how long did it take you from those bursts kind of seeds of doubt that this was forever to actually tell him that it was over um I think probably a couple of years probably festering sort of bubbling under the surface maybe at that point without me even realizing it but just certain things that um were out of bounds like getting a light bulb out of the loft or um you know questions that I'd ask about my business and the running of that business that I wasn't allowed to have visibility over.

16:08And actually one key character in my book, a business mentor that I really wanted to work with, a lady by the name of Erica, helped me to see a lot. She didn't try to show me that there were necessarily alarm bells that I should be listening to, but just through the process of working with her to build the profile of my business and to build a strategy around it that I didn't have at that time the friction that that created between us and our marriage started to make me reassess you know what that relationship was really about and it certainly was becoming far more controlling than it ever had been in the past.

16:55It does seem that that is probably one of the most powerful changes that you made. Yeah. Because now you're single, you're on your own, you're outside of this marriage, and you have your own decisions to make, probably for the first time, really, because you've gone from your family to uni to your husband. And now it's just Vicky. Yeah. How do I set up a direct debit? How do I set up a bank account? I mean, these questions just sound crazy, don't they? When you had this, from the outside, brilliant business, you had this very strong person, you know, that was admired by all these women coming in to be taught by you.

17:31And yet on the other side of the coin was this person who didn't have much control at all. yeah and I think that environment you know okay I set it up and but I think it was created by everybody who was part of it and I think that started to show me as well you know there were women like yourself who were there becoming stronger every day using an amazing exercise methodology that was very little known back then and it was transforming people and I think in the process of that it was transforming me as well so we were sort of projecting onto each other Strength onto each other. Yeah, it was an amazing environment of empowerment.

18:10And so, you know, I reflect on lots of examples of that, like my friendship group, where suddenly you just feel this overwhelming sense that you can't let those people down. You know, it would be disingenuous and lacking in integrity to allow this sort of backdrop that existed in my life at the time to continue. you so we then kind of go on to vicky mark too um was it would appear like the next big thing that changes your outlook on what is possible for you and where you can go is for some reason you go on sas who dares wins or you you decide that you know this is this is the way you're going to prove something to yourself yeah i don't even know if it was that premeditated at the time I mean I'd I'd watched there were three series before mine that were all men and so I'd watched it with this sort of freedom of thinking I wonder if I could do I'd probably give that a shot I don't know if I'd be any good at that part you know um sort of um sofa kind of coaching you know and um and then they announced that they were going to allow women to participate and so I put something on my Instagram I shared a story I think from at Middleton's account and then I was just inundated with people saying well then are you going to reply and it honestly hadn't actually crossed my mind and I sort of did it just to say yeah okay okay I have I have I've filled out the application form now leave me alone and then of course you go through a process and um just yeah chain reaction and you're there and then I was there in Chile and and I you know thought it had been some big mistake or that I'd last for 24 hours and be out and actually at the time I was meant to be running a retreat in Kefalonia for Barworks so I had to give that a miss and send some of my team to do that and I thought I'll probably join them in a day or two yeah and you ended up getting down to the final few yeah yeah it's like the final isn't it yeah so I got through 11 days and um and as you just said you know it was the most amazing kind of concentrated accelerated period of transformation for me I don't think you could set that up if you tried you know it was literally like I I'd left my marriage I think this was about six months later that I did the show and you know day after day or not even each day but several times a day we were being tasked to do what seemed like impossible things and I was having to confront every single fear in the book um and realizing that I could I could do it and survive and um and actually my I think my sort of stubborn street was quite helpful because they did pick up on a lot of my fears and so they started towards was the end of it to leave me to go last on these different tasks so that they could film my pen top worse and worse and more and more anxious about it yeah and I think I channeled that into a sort of stubborn well fuck you I'm going to show you what I can do I will not be beaten and you know so I do things like count how many steps the other recruits took to walk across the ladder across the ravine heights terrify me I mean I was literally shaking before doing it but I was just literally counting the steps that it took me to do it and the ice holes which is another fairly famous moment counting how long it took and I was like six this is over in 60 seconds I just need to do the thing I need to just put literally put one foot in front of the other and so yeah little by little I kind of realized what my real capabilities were and I you know I'm so grateful for that opportunity as I don't think I would ever have discovered that when you left Chile you left the show um was it an immediate feeling that this this has changed my life now I can't go back yeah yeah and also I don't even go to your husband just there is something that has been woken up inside me yeah I need to push more and find where this person can go yeah and I think I learned two really key lessons from that one that fear is not a wall it's a doorway it's a signpost so then I started to think okay the things that I fear the most must be the things that I gravitate towards and the other was about sort of the relativity of resilience I I suppose, because there were honestly moments through that process that I'd sort of sit with myself with my thoughts or even in interrogation when your head is in a bag and you've got these headphones on and, you know, your sort of hands are tied behind your back and you're being brutalized thinking I shouldn't perhaps make exact parallels, but just mentally thinking I've chosen to be here.

23:13I will get through this. And sometimes through those moments, It just wasn't as bad as the...

23:47Jamal and Alfonso Davies. Right now, get one of nine legendary cups when you order the FIFA World Cup meal only at McDonald's. At participating McDonald's, only for a limited time, while supplies last. All rights reserved. Copyright 2026. McDonald's at the FIFA World Cup 2026.

24:08Darkest moments of my divorce that I knew I had to go back to and that that was real life. And I couldn't choose to escape that. so did it accelerate your healing from the marriage yeah I think so and it helped me grow yeah new edges and just to to realize that we can get through almost anything and you learned that in such a condensed period of time yeah so when you came back and you go back to being a bar teacher yeah how quickly was the the mind kind of worrying thinking what else can I do oh that was it was such a hard transition honestly you sort of I came back with it and I've spoken to lots of people who've done and I've sort of had the same thing since I've done other challenges as well you sort of come back with a sense of like apathy a bit but you just can't be bothered with the trivialities of life anymore so you've had this life-changing experience and your brain is telling you that there's been this huge shift but you've come back to a world mundanity exactly just a world that hasn't changed and you kind of have so I found that really hard but actually the next challenge was kind of handed to me so I did a press event for SAS Who Dares Wins and someone came up to me and said do you want to row an ocean and I was in this kind of yeah slightly crazy phase of my life yeah I just say yes to everything and I honestly couldn't think of a good reason to say no and my mind's racing with all of these kind of thoughts of I don't even know what an ocean rowing boat looks like which ocean how long does it take I knew nothing about it but I did know that I still hadn't overcome my fear of water because I'd had one task in the SAS show that hadn't ended well almost a sort of what felt to me like a reenactment of that childhood drowning scene and I realized that I had to face that properly and and it felt like rowing an ocean what better ways and going going out in the ocean with some strangers um being tossed around for a few weeks 11 000 meters above the seabed i mean yeah and and being with strangers in a confined space and you know what could possibly go wrong with that um and it turned out to be a seismic another seismic moment because this was probably i imagine looking looking at what you did was was harder than you could have ever imagined that challenge yeah so much tell us a bit about the training that goes into that because I you know talked a lot today was talking about something earlier on to a journalist about health goals and you know we talk about the first step and you get on you know you just got to start that journey but it's almost unfathomable for most people to think about taking on rowing an ocean so where do you begin?

26:53Oh well so the first thing I did was to sit on a rowing machine for two hours because that would have been the rotation for four people two hours on two hours off and I thought well I'd better find out how two hours feels like yeah and um uh I learned my lesson very quickly to be extremely selective with underwear because I ended up with the worst chain imaginable so that was a very early lesson an awful backache and so yeah I thought my god what am I doing yeah uh regretting my decisions immediately but uh yeah that sort of stubborn streak came out and you know I can't give up on something once I've committed to do it so um where did I start I mean yeah just Just increasing the training.

27:35How long did you have to prepare? So this was back in 2019, and we were planning to do the 2020 Great Pacific Race. What else happened in 2020? Major global event that scuppered things slightly. And it did. So, yeah, we'd spent over a year preparing, raising all the funding,£70 ,000. In fact, we packed our boat up with everything needed for it to be shipped to San Francisco uh the weekend before we all got put into lockdown um and then they announced that the race was going to be postponed to the next year which was just devastating and not least because my teammates who I'd got to know quite well um couldn't defer their places and so I was kind of left with this mad project as a non-rower they were both rowing coaches actually so I was sort of learning an awful lot from them um but just with this um you know strong conviction and commitment not least it would have been easy at this point to pull out um but I'm a ambassador for a charity inspiring girls we were raising money for them I felt like this huge kind of you know duty and obligation to see it through and also this was in my head the next chapter of my life and this was what I was meant to be doing and um and you know the world was just in complete disarray and my business was as well actually you know we had to take everything online yeah you know remember we did all the Instagram online Instagram classes which was actually amazing in itself but not sustainable no and um yeah so so for a period of time it was just all in limbo actually um and then I set about uh trying to find new teammates and that in itself was another lesson wasn't it the people you ended up rowing with yeah tell us yeah so um one of them was in lived in Dubai so I didn't get to meet her until we got to San Francisco um and the other had actually sort of reached out to me through Instagram so she'd been in the army um and I think she'd seen me on SAS Who Dares Wins and she knew that I was looking for new teammates so she reached out and just a formidable woman she'd also played rugby for England many years back um and just exactly the kind of person that you thought you would need uh to to take on something like that and she brought her friend into the team.

30:11So we didn't, we weren't all in one place until we got to the start line. Would you advise if you were doing that again, that you would meet people and spend a bit of time? No, not the best way to initiate a good team dynamic, I would say. So yeah, lots of, I mean, so many lessons learned, but a lot of it was out of our control and we kind of did the best we could to get to know each other. But I mean, you're taking on something like that. It's huge. And and, you know, I'll be honest, I think there were so many moments where I was so grateful to them for coming into the team and to, you know, making sure it didn't unravel again or completely that there were there were red flags, but I kind of chose to ignore them.

30:59And there were lots of moments, I think, where I didn't speak up, where I didn't challenge things and where I didn't ask difficult questions because part of me was probably intimidated by both of them. And again, we're back to that place where, you know, you sort of comply and self-edit a bit and, you know, don't confront situations that don't in your gut and your instinct feel right. so you know I take responsibility for aspects of that as well but it became very clear very quickly that it was a very difficult dynamic and that there were some real clashes of how long were you on the water for in total 60 days wow and that in that kind of space with those constraints with the food and everything else yeah and the danger yeah and things going wrong as they did and the weather not necessarily being on your side must have felt like 360 days.

31:59I don't imagine the 24-hour clock goes round very quickly. No, very slowly. And added to that, I was seasick for 20 days. When you say seasick, people kind of go, oh, yeah, I've been on a dinghy, not felt great. Tell us what that actually, what real seasickness feels like. So if I tell you that I didn't change my clothes for that entire period of time, that maybe tells you something. like you literally can't function um all I could do to make myself feel better was to row so for that reason I didn't miss a single rowing shift so I was barely taking in any food I was trying to eat but throwing up um which in itself is exhausting of course and um you know I couldn't sit up in the cabin I had to lie down as soon as I got in there um so yeah just you you cannot function what what how does it come to an end just the weather and the sea changes i think you just adapt i mean i tried absolutely everything i had seasickness tablets patches i had a um a sort of an electrical impulse um bracelet that i wore um nothing worked in those 20 days were there any light moments were there any moments of relief or anything that made you laugh or how do you get through that physical you know that you one thing being mentally challenged in that but to be so physically worn down as well yeah I mean it's funny because obviously there was a huge physical aspect to it I'm I now more reflect on the sort of psychological one really um but yeah I mean it It was in every way you can imagine.

33:37It was torturous, really. How did it compare to SAS? Oh, completely different. On SAS, I always had the option to VW, to voluntarily withdraw, which in the end I did through interrogation. When you're on an ocean, you can't evacuate. I mean, you can, but that in itself is actually highly dangerous. um and you know so those decisions are taken away from you which I guess in a way is kind of a gift because it forces you then to sit with the discomfort and to work it out in your own head and I think I learned a huge amount about my own psychology through that process and developed all sorts of coping mechanisms that kind of got me through the hardest moments um and not just when the team dynamic wasn't great but you know just through sheer home sickness and physical sickness and just the mental relentlessness of 1.3 million strokes on the oars you know it's a long long long long time do you have anything to do with those women now no no we don't speak um and it's such a shame and you know we're sort of programmed to want closure on things in our lives aren't we and it's actually the question that I get asked the most whenever I do a keynote are you still in touch with them it's almost always the first question that someone asks and um and I do feel regret about that and in any kind of team endeavor particularly in a sporting environment as you will know the debrief is so important and in military environments as well and it's a real shame that we didn't ever do that but I think sometimes there are relationships in our lives that we also just need to walk away from and quite often you're never going to hear what you need to hear or want to hear um and you know I also will will freely accept that their experience may well have been different to mine um I don't know how much self-awareness they had over how that played out for me um there are a few indicators that there was some self-awareness but um you know in the end And I sort of allowed so many parts of myself to become eroded through that experience.

36:0760 days of constantly just biting my lip, letting things go, not speaking up. And, you know, you know me fairly well, Gabby. I'm not someone to sort of where I see injustice, I will speak up about it. I will defend myself. I'll defend other people. But when you're in a 24 foot boat in the middle of an ocean, you cannot allow conflict. um and uh you know so that's a really long time to feel that you have lost your sense of self and your voice and so yeah when we set foot on land we sort of had a an evening celebration which was a little bit awkward and strained um I think there were some genuine moments of um you know shared achievement um and we got a world record which is incredible yeah um and an amazing thing to do and we raised lots of money for our charities and um it was all things said and done an unbelievable experience and I've learned so much from it and it clearly hasn't put you off a lot of people might think well I never want to go anywhere anything like that again this seemed to fuel in you um a desire to keep on pushing yourself mentally and physically maybe searching for the perfect crossing and maybe maybe the perfect row if that exists i don't know deep down what what your end game kind of felt like it had to be when you decided to do more of this yeah well i think i i sort of by this point having taken such a bizarre turn in my life you You know, and there aren't, well, certainly when I was growing up, there weren't many role models.

37:49I didn't know where this was going, to be completely honest. And I think every time I've taken a challenge on, I've sort of my next decision has just been about. Maybe how do I put that right, but maybe what else is there left to learn about myself or about other people or about, you know, a skill that I can acquire or an environment that I can exist in or thrive in. um and I definitely came out of you know so I came off the row and I closed my business so I really had a blank sheet of paper and I sort of started doing speaking work and I TEDx which was just phenomenal but um and uh you know but um yeah I I think once you start on that adventure train it's really hard to get off and so quite soon I was thinking well what's next you know what should I do next and I I'd lost my faith in teamwork and I think I just went down for a while a couple of years I went down a path of okay I'm going to do solo endeavors and uh I'm going to find out who I am when I don't have anyone else when I can't rely on anyone else um do I have those internal resources so talk us through them there was Cy4 Across America well so that came later so i did the arctic ultra run yeah yeah so 250 kilometers in snowshoes in the arctic in temperatures that night got to minus carrying all your own carrying everything except for shelter but yeah all of you know food and kit and equipment it's part of a bigger race so there are other people participating in it as well but essentially you are running for five days in your own head at your own pace um and some of those days were like 18 19 hours long and were you actually running can you actually really so it's quick walking yeah how physically demanding was that compared to say the row um I mean again I don't know that anything is ever going to compare to 60 days on an ocean um it was five days and um you know there is as ever with these things a certain amount of sort of support and checkpoints and things like that but um it was hard in its own way it was hard in terms of sort of managing yourself and your pace because you can't get too hot and you can't get too cold you've got too many markers around either where you are and there can be a blizzard exactly in seconds the landscape can change from being really clear and bright blue skies you can't see anything in front of your face so um but that was a really amazing experience and I did it actually with a friend and that kind of started to give me a bit of faith in um allowing myself to trust again and um but also sort of exploring time on my own and um yeah just being in that beautiful landscape but that is also so incredibly hostile and you know that you put a foot wrong if you leave your gloves off for too long um you're in trouble so so the cycle was across america cycle was across america so after i did the arctic i then did a kenya run um which you know in completely contrasting temperatures of course and um and that was incredible it was um we were allowed to run through conservancies that are usually restricted to humans on foot and so we were amongst the wildlife and uh you know that was quite a quite the healing journey and I'd had some personal challenges to deal with in a relationship that had come to an end and and lots of feelings of betrayal again I do open up about a bit in the book and and just being surrounded by animals and the earth and the sun and again just standing on my own two feet um was just transformative I sort of started that race feeling incredibly broken and I think needing to prove that I could somehow stand up again after what I'd been through and ending it just feeling so free and that I just dropped this cloak finally of yeah trying to bend to other people's narratives and other people's behaviors and and their impact on me and starting to realize that it really is all about controlling your internal climate your trust was tested in that relationship that you talk about and also in other things that happened to you in the boat and you know yeah do you think as you sit here now you trust people such a good question um I think I'm getting better at that um and I'm in a new relationship and it's wonderful um but there are moments where uh I struggle to be cared for I think um I remember my therapist actually asking me at one point do you know how to be looked after and I sort of just burst into tears and I just didn't have an answer um so I think I do struggle with that a little bit but yeah I'm learning and and I think what helps is going through what's a very cathartic process of writing a book you start to really reconcile a lot of the kind of patterns of behaviors my own and other people's and start to I guess yeah sift through them work them out understand them a bit more and and become, I guess, in some way a bit philosophical about it and sort of distanced.

43:45And, you know, and again, all of that has informed the title of the book and the concept of the book that, you know, it really is about managing your own forecast and yeah not stepping into the behaviors and the somebody else's cyclone or somebody else's storm and realizing that none of that's really about you but I think that's human instinct isn't it because to our social connection is so vital to our survival that's how we're programmed for survival it's hard to kind of rewire those instincts um to be able to have relationships without adopting yeah or bringing into your life yeah or the the weather as you term it that other people bring yeah and so when somebody picks your book up and um and reads it what do you want them to take away from your learnings oh um gosh so many things I mean every chapter ends with a um chapter take out yeah it's a very task it's in that respect sorry to interrupt you it's a very um uh accessible way of of learning actually and taking from those chapters I think it's I really like the style that you've you've written it in it's and it's not um preachy in the sense of kind of, you know, you must do this and you must do that.

45:13But learning from this chapter, this is what I see as my learnings in life. Yeah. And I hope, I love that you've picked that up. And I never want to be someone who's suggesting that we have to take on ocean roads and climb mountains. Because that's my conduit. That's what I've chosen. And, you know, in many ways, not even consciously, I've sort of just fallen into this bizarre lifestyle. But that's how I've navigated all of that. But for someone else, it will be completely different. It might be somebody picking it up, thinking they could never do a half marathon. Yes. And that, you know, I think it does.

45:54Whatever the challenge is, it doesn't have to be. I'm not going to row the ocean, you know, but I can still pick your book up. But the radical part of it is just about committing to being you, to being yourself and to living that life consciously and determinedly and um yeah i think sort of disengaging yourself at times as much as possible from what other people might expect from you shedding those layers like i think it's also clear that that doesn't mean you know people talk about authenticity a lot in modern parlance and they also talk um about kind of this is what you know on my honesty and I'm going to say as it is and that doesn't mean upsetting other people you know because I often think when you especially when you see those social media clips where you know people talk about speaking their truth that doesn't mean that you have to ignore the feelings of others no of course not and none of us exist in a vacuum and you know that was what I learned through that period of sort of self-reliance I suppose where I did the Arctic and the Kenya run and and then I realized that you know um that's terribly empowering but it doesn't preclude having healthy relationships with other people like that's what we're here to do and that's how how we thrive and that's what led me to do race across america as a team of four women and that was an amazing experience and restored i was gonna say it was that quite it seems like it was quite healing from that rowing experience a wonderful experience and not just the four of us but we had an 11 person crew just people giving up their time to help us get a record was just uh and you all still speak amazing we're all still speak we're all still great friends and have amazing memories um so you're you're absolutely right it's not about isolating yourself and saying well you know nothing else matters apart from who I am and what's inside of me and how I'm going to kind of live that in my life um of course not but it is about I guess um just distancing yourself from the things that you cannot control and there's so much power behind that I've learned um and I don't know if you've ever read man's search for meaning by Viktor Frankl which was written as a um sort of documentation of his time in Auschwitz and he concluded that anything could be taken away from a man or a woman uh but one thing which is um the uh last of the human freedoms the ability to choose one's uh response in any given set of circumstances and i think there's so much power behind that and that is just really human nature no matter what era we live in what we've been through the only thing we can ever really control are the thoughts in our heads and then the you know the behaviors uh that that come from that and I think it's it's wise to remember that that's true of every of everyone you know in the ways that sometimes we interact are driven by influences that we can have no control over but if we can understand them then that helps and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to be or try to be so open and frank and honest in the telling of my story and you have been and uh it's a fantastic read very inspiring but as you say you know you don't need to be a about to embark on a row around the world or a cycle across America or a five-day Arctic, not even a marathon.

49:27How many miles did you come from that? 250 kilometers. 250, sorry, 50 kilometers, yeah. It's brilliant. And I love the way you have gone back to your childhood to give us an insight as well. And so many of your experiences will resonate. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming in and good luck on the next challenge, which is a Pacific row. No, Atlantic. Sorry, Atlantic Row. I've done the Pacific. Yeah, I've done the Pacific. Atlantic with somebody you have met. Yes, very, very good friend, very dear friend of mine, Sophie. Yeah, we're rowing across the Atlantic this December, hoping to set a record for a female pair.

50:05Our team name is Grow. So we're all about how women grow together and everything that we can learn about resilience and science and lots of, you know, exploration into high performance. strategies and well-being tactics and recovery and all of that stuff. Best of luck. You're a beacon of health, hope and happiness at the moment, Vicky. So it seems to be doing you the world of good to be in this state. I'm so pleased to see you. Thanks, Gabby.

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