Liz’s positive drive to live life to the full has led her to meet her challenges head on.
Qualifying as a Yachtmaster Instructor aged just 21, she went on to lead sailing expeditions around the UK before sailing solo to Greece.
In 2005-06 she took on the might of the Atlantic Rowing Race, along with her fiancée. Encountering hurricanes, tropical storms, whales, serious injuries, capsizes and equipment failure, before reaching the Caribbean and becoming the 13th woman ever to row an ocean and the first woman in history row into Antigua.
Not being one to rest on her laurels, and whilst holding down a full time job and tackling (possibly the hardest challenge of them all) ‘motherhood’, she then returned to her passion of triathlon and Ironman events.
In 2018 she qualified to represent GB in her age group at both Olympic and Ironman distances and raced in the GB colours from 2018-2022.
Alongside GB triathlon training, this was a particularly challenging period, as covid all but destroyed her businesses. And lead to a career pivot into healthcare and setting up the Covid vaccination programme in North Hampshire.
It was a few years later at the World Championships in Abu Dhabi in November 2022 that Liz first noticed a rapidly growing lump on her tonsil which coincided with a neck lump on the same side, and following a series of investigations, she was diagnosed with throat cancer 4 weeks later.
Liz underwent a brand new 7-week, million-pound, trial treatment of proton beam therapy at The Christie Hospital in Manchester in 2023, which left her with radiotherapy burns both inside and outside her throat.
Whilst now in remission, she remains under the care of the hospital and will live with the life-changing side effects of this treatment forever. But wasting no time, Liz is now back taking on ultra marathon running, completing 105km this year, with sights on 100 milers in the future.
Liz talks with honesty and humility about the challenges she has faced in life. Both those that she has chosen and those that life has chosen to throw at her. She describes finding joy in all the small things, her coping mechanisms, never settling for ‘okay’ and the drive to always keep moving forward, that can be applied across all walks of life.
Hampshire
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