Sean Conway is an adventurer and a bit of a lunatic. It’s a good combination. His website states that “Adventure isn’t all about climbing mountains or rowing oceans. Adventure, in its purest form, is simply a way of thinking!” Sean’s website is also telling in that it is split into two sections, “Dreams” (things still to do) and “Memories” (stuff he has done). I think it’s good to have plenty of both in life.

Alastair: You’ve done lots of different trips, such a variety. Can you just start out by giving us a potted history?

Sean: As with many of my expeditions, it started out quite small. I’mve done the Gloucestershire Cheese Rolling, which was the best 23 seconds of my life. I’mve walked to London, 150 miles, for cheaper than the cost of the train ticket of £48.50. I’mve done a few Strong Man runs and Tough Mudders. I’mve cycled Land’s End to John O’Groats, I’mve also swam from Land’s End to John o’Groats. I’mve done the Three Peaks Cycle Challenge, I climbed Kilimanjaro dressed as a penguin. And as every adventurer in the world has also done, I’mve cycled around the world once upon a time. So that’s it in a nutshell, I think. And this weekend, I’mm cycling to Paris in 24 hours. It feels like I need a day trip out, basically.

Alastair: Leaving a pub after a pint and getting back into the same pub for last orders the next day?

Sean: Exactly. So, yeah, it’s going to be tough and I’mm not really fit at all, but yeah, the beers will get me through.

Alastair: I think it’s a great idea. I guess your first massive trip was cycling around the world, is that fair?

Sean: Oh yeah, by a long way. I’mve done loads of adventures but they were all just holiday-based events and things for myself. But I guess the first one that I took properly seriously, and raised money for charity and everything was when I attempted the world record for around the world cycling. I guess that was the start of it all.

Alastair: Why did you decided to go from just doing these quite fun adventures – the sort of things that thousands of people do – to doing something that’s really quite big and quite difficult?

Sean: Well, two things really. One, I was miserable in my job. I had a quite creative job, I was a photographer, but unfortunately I said “yes” to too many clients that didn’t give me much creative work. Ten years later I was this very boring corporate photographer photographing bankers, and after 2009, bankers didn’t want to be photographed too much. Yet I was still being paid to go into Lloyds and Barclays and photograph all the staff, who didn’t even really want to be there. There’s nothing more soul-destroying than a job that everyone hated, including yourself. I decided to just quit. I sold my business for a pound, I still have that pound somewhere. It’s framed. So I was now 30 years old. I had no money, no spark, no desire to do anything. And I just thought maybe I should just go travelling, but I can’t afford to go travelling. What can I do to get someone to pay me to go travelling?
I was just really miserable and depressed, and I thought, well maybe If I try something a little bit daft, a little bit bonkers, and a little bit completely out of my league, that would get me my confidence back and also allow me to go and travel which I had never done before.
And that’s when I thought of the around the world cycling because I’md always followed people like yourself, like Mark Beaumont, and Vin Cox and even back in the day Tommy Godwin, who did all those incredible rides, but through lack of confidence I always thought, oh that’s what people with money do, that’s what people who are superhuman do XYZ, which was all completely wrong, it was just…

Alastair: I’mm quite superhuman…

Sean: I know, I know..! But you know what I mean. Once I broke it down into baby steps, I realised that actually it was do-able. I went and looked for sponsors. Trained hard, then looked at bikes and eventually, a year later, I was on the start line, and cycling around the world.

Alastair: Once you’re actually out on the road then – let’s say a couple of months in – once you’d got the hang of the whole process, how were you feeling then in terms of your happiness and wellbeing and all the things you set out for? Did it solve life’s problems?

Sean: Well, I got thrown a bit of a curve ball.

Alastair: Getting run over?

Sean: Yes, that was my curve ball. At the beginning I was doing well, I was ahead of the world record. I was looking to halve Mark Beaumont’s record. I was averaging nearly 200 miles a day on the bike. I was feeling pretty confident. Within six months I went from only being able to do 30 miles a day to nearly 200 a day through the Atacama Desert, you know? So I was feeling super confident and I just felt right and I enjoyed pushing myself physically and mentally. I was enjoying being hungry and tired and all that. I wanted to do this really fast, like a fast adventure endurance race.
But then, as you said, unfortunately I got run over in America and that was hard to deal with, you know? I sacrificed a lot for this race. Girlfriends dumped me, I moved back in with my mum and all that sort of thing. But I didn’t mind making those sacrifices because it was something I really had a drive for, and a spark. For the first time in ages I had this spark to achieve something I thought I could do. So yeah, it was hard to kind of lose that in one fell swoop.
I had a month off the bike, I nearly came home, I nearly quit, but then I thought, “you’ll only get one chance at this.” Not many people get the opportunity to cycle around the world twice. It’s not like I’mll get that opportunity again and also I figured you only get run over once, right?

Alastair: It’s like the bullet with your name on it [joke for Blackadder fans].

Sean: Well, exactly! The statistics were in my favour. Which is obviously complete nonsense but I figured if you’re going to get run over, you only get run over once, really in life, and I’mve had my turn now, so it’s all good.

Alastair: Would you say that you don’t need to be a cyclist in order to cycle around the world?

Sean: 100% you don’t need to be. I met in the Rocky Mountains a lady, she must have been 70 odd years old. She has done 110,000 miles around the world so far in the last 20 years. And her pedals didn’t even have the plastic on them. There was just the metal sticking out. She had wellies on. Plastic bags for rain jackets, and she only did 20 miles a day, but that was because she was 70, and she didn’t really care much for pushing big miles.
But you really don’t need to know much. When I cycled Land’s End to John O’Groats, it took me a month. That’s how rubbish I was. I had to have a few rest days. I didn’t know how to change a puncture. Luckily I didn’t get one. I don’t know what I would have done, to be honest. But yeah, cycling I still think is one of my favourite disciplines, because you can cover such big distances. You’ve got the downhills to recover. You get the hard uphills and then you’re rewarded with an amazing downhill, so it’s just an easy way of seeing the world and you really don’t need to know much.

Alastair: It’s interesting that you say you really like cycling because your adventure CV is very generalised. You haven’t become a specialist in the way people become specialist mountaineers. Why have you deliberately done a variety of trips rather than becoming a specialist?

Sean: It was never a deliberate decision. I like the challenge of trying something that I couldn’t do before or I thought wasn’t possible. A lot of it probably boils down to the fact that I wasn’t a very confident kid. I was quite small at school. I was really tiny and I grew up in a big, rugby playing, South African high school which meant that, if you weren’t massive, you didn’t feature in sport at all. And maybe that’s where my lack of confidence as a sports person or an adventurer came from.
So I just like the idea of trying something I can’t do and going through all the baby steps of training and getting fitter, and I love documenting that process, you know? So it wasn’t a necessarily that I wanted to do everything. It’s just more that that’s what challenges me. So for example, running. I want to run Land’s End to John O’Groats this summer, and the longest run I’mve ever done in my life is probably 10km. I never run. Literally, I only bought my first proper pair of trainers last week. I did three miles on Monday and I nearly died.

Alastair: And similarly, the massive trip that you’ve done recently, which is the one I’mm most impressed with because I’mm rubbish at swimming, is swimming the length Britain. But you also are a rubbish swimmer.

Sean: Oh yeah, I’mm pretty slow. In my first training session in the pool I got seasick from all the waves generated by the swimmers in the lanes next to me.

Alastair: How do you go about getting a trip like that off the ground? If you want to cycle round the world you can read books by other people who have done it. You buy a bike and a tent and off you go. But how did you go into the uncharted waters of a big swimming expedition? What’s the process?

Sean: First you come up with the idea and for this one it actually was really tough because I struggled to get useful advice. If you go online and search ‘œSean Conway swimming Britain forums’, there’s a lot of negativity. A lot of people thought it was a PR stunt. A lot of people just sort of thought, ‘œoh, this is so daft, I’mm not even going to bother even replying to your email.’

Logistically, well, first I had to fund it, and I don’t have much money, so I just got loads of credit cards. That kind of got the funding initially out of the way. Then I had to find a crew. I managed to find four amazing crew members who believed in it. And then there was the logistics of route, food, boats I was going to use, and you just try to ask people who are willing to help. [I learned later that Sean bought his battered old support boat -unseen- on the eBay app on his phone when in a pub!]

Alastair: It seems to me that the thing that is really evident from you is a huge amount of optimism.

Sean: Well, stubbornness.

Alastair:  I think your optimism is something that really shines through. What makes that so striking for me is that you set out on your bike trip originally because you were really not very cheerful and hopeful about your normal life. You’re optimistic by nature, yet your life had slid into an unhappy, negative rut.

Sean: I knew something needed to change. I knew I had nothing to lose. I don’t want to get too philosophical and say, ‘œoh, I was at rock bottom blah, blah, blah,’ – I was just generally miserable and unhappy with everything, and it’s not where I thought I would be when I was 30. I thought I was going to be this really creative photographer, doing all these amazing advertising campaigns and catalog shoots in the Maldives. I didn’t have the confidence to pitch to those clients, and even now looking back, I go, ‘œwhy wasn’t I getting these jobs?’ Well it was because you didn’t go out and bloody look for them, you idiot! It’s because I just didn’t think I had the confidence so it’s my own fault completely, to be honest.

Alastair: When I spoke to you awhile ago about this Adventure1000 idea, you came up with the suggestion that it should be Adventure999.

Sean: I think you should go with it, please do. Because it sounds cool. It would be like your emergency life changer.

Alastair: I think that’s almost getting to the nub of the thing because for not very much money you can commit to something which can potentially save / change your life.

Sean: Oh yeah, 100%. You know what it’s like, you get those questions all the time. Out of all the people that email me asking me for advice, I think 80% of the time it’s, ‘œhow do I find sponsorship?’ And my first reply to all these people is, firstly, you don’t need as much money as you think. Secondly, if you had the choice of working a month longer, or two months longer to save more money versus working for a sponsor for the duration of a five month expedition, I know what I would choose every time. I would choose working, saving money beforehand and being a free agent, rather than becoming, technically, an employee of your sponsor.
For big expeditions you obviously want sponsors. You want sponsors because they have the right kit, and the right equipment, and the right knowledge, and things like that. But for a potential life changing expedition to go and find yourself, meet some amazing people, and challenge and grow your confidence, you really don’t need as much money as you think.

Alastair: It’s interesting that you say you get a lot of questions about sponsorship. I also get that. I also get a lot of people asking me how they become an adventurer. By which people mean how to get a T.V. deal, how to get a book deal, how do they become famous. And you had your Andy Warhol burst of fame – and rightly so – after your fantastic swim. On the papers, on the telly, all that sort of stuff. How did you find that media side of being an adventurer?

Sean: I’mm not going to lie to you, doing a ‘world first’, something that no one has ever done before and being told you couldn’t do it: I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that wanted to go, yeah, you know what? I did do it, and all those people who said you couldn’t do it: in your face!
Part of me really wanted to tell my story and inspire other people and that sort of thing. And the media stuff, it’s fun. That’s all it is. It’s a bit of fun. You soon realize you can be on the One Show and BBC Breakfast and a total viewership of 20 million or something, but four days later, they have all forgotten about you. So yeah, I tend to not take it too seriously.

Being a professional adventurer, it’s almost like an oxymoron in a way, because the whole idea of being an adventurer is to go and challenge yourself and get away from it all, but to become a professional adventurer you have to be in the middle of it all. Not all the time but sometimes. It’s kind of counterintuitive, which is a shame. Which is why I’mm now going away. I’mm taking some time out, I’mm not doing anymore interviews or talks or anything actually.

Alastair: That sounds very nice. Okay, my final question and then I can let you get away from it all, what adventure would you do for £1000?

Sean: Well you can get around the world in a hundred days. So I reckon you could do two laps of the world. Actually you probably couldn’t eat enough calories for a fiver a day, but if it wasn’t for the visa, for the flight, from… OK I reckon you could cycle to Beijing and back.
Or else I’md like to walk to the midnight sun. Set out from home and walk north up to the Arctic Circle. That would be fun.

My new book, Grand Adventures, is out now.
It’s designed to help you dream big, plan quick, then go explore.
The book contains interviews and expertise from around 100 adventurers, plus masses of great photos to get you excited.

I would be extremely grateful if you bought a copy here today!

I would also be really thankful if you could share this link on social media with all your friends – http://goo.gl/rIyPHA. It honestly would help me far more than you realise.

Thank you so much!