Dawn breaks over Sophie’s Alpine Coast to Coast in 2014; painted for the 2016 London Marathon; cycling the 2016 Penine Coast to Coast
Photographs Dean Alexander
‘One day you won’t be able to do this. Today is not that day.’ I love that affirmation, and use it a lot to get me through the challenges I pepper my life with now.
When I started my first job in 2007, at a tech startup, I was really ambitious. But I quickly felt walls were closing in, stopping me from achieving my goals. I didn’t want to wait for someone to open a door. You can’t go to work and say, ‘I want to be a manager today’, but in your personal life you can say, ‘I want to climb Everest’.