Emma Timmis is not a professional adventurer. That is, she doesn’t make money from her escapades so she works hard, saves up and then takes off, making her dreams come alive. Jo Gunston chats to endurance runner about her passion for adventure and how she makes sure those dreams happen.
Part-time adventurer and bucket carrier, Emma Timmis
‘I am a normal person,’ is the first line of Emma Timmis’ blog. This ‘normal person’ has run across Africa, the equivalent of 94 marathons in 89 days, rollerskated across The Netherlands, and cycled to the Dolomites – all in her spare time.
Recently she won the award for physical endeavour at the National Adventure Awards 2015.
So if Emma is so ‘normal’, what makes her stand out from the rest of us in making these crazy ideas come to life?
“It all starts the same for everyone, I guess” begins Emma, “which is that you do something for charity and then, when it’s all over you kind of think, ‘Oh, what I am supposed to now? Am I supposed to just go back to normal life?’ And that’s kind of the harder part I guess.
“That might be the same situation for a lot of people doing the same thing as me. You feel like you need to do another one and another one.
“I’m not very good at the normal side of things maybe. The things that everyone thinks are hard are the things I don’t think are hard.
“I don’t think that the training and the physical part of it… I don’t find that all that hard. I mean it is hard but I find things like sitting in front of a computer so much harder.”
Running across Africa
How did you even come up with the idea of running across Africa and what made you actually go through with it?
Emma Timmis watches out for local wildlife
“I was working for the RSPCA at a wildlife centre,” says the endurance runner, “and all of the staff that work there are so passionate and hard working. I wanted to raise some money for them specifically.
“I can’t bake cakes or anything, that’s not my cup of tea, I don’t want to poison anyone. So I thought, ‘What kind of things interest me?’ It was at the same time that Eddie Izzard was running his 51 marathons, or however many he did, in consecutive days around the UK.
“He’s twice my age, I thought, and I don’t think he had any running background beforehand. I did and I thought, if he can do something like that then so can I.
“But I don’t really want to run around England – it’s cold and wet. The footage I saw of Eddie with cars almost running him over didn’t look like fun to me.
“Then I thought about countries I could run in. I was looking at about 1,000 miles. So what countries are about 1,000 miles where I can run from A to B across?
“So I looked at Africa because I was searching for somewhere that’s quite warm and also somewhere where there wouldn’t be too many language problems. Also somewhere that’s affordable because I wasn’t earning a lot of money at the time. I was funding the whole trip myself.
“I’m also one of those people that whatever it is I say I’m going to do, if I’ve said it to somebody else and I’ve actually vocalised it, then I really feel like I can’t not do it!”
Funding circle
You fund yourself so how does the financial side of it work for a part-time endurance runner?
“I just work for a while and save the money and then go. For the Africa trip I used up all of my holiday throughout the year and I worked extra days and weekends and evenings. I covered every shift possible so that I could take two months off to do that one.”
Emma shows there’s an intermediate way between huge expeditions and just using your annual leave to achieve your dreams. You’ve just got to start with a plan.
Emma social
Emma on Instagram
Recommended by Jo
More of sofa adventurer than an actual one? Me too. I voraciously consume adventure books and documentaries and totally recommend the following. I’m sure Emma will have a book out one day too!
Netflix original documentary recounting the team of four women, the Coxless Crew, who rowed from San Francisco to Australia – yep, you read that right!
If you like this, you may also like:
Sarah Davis – the first woman to paddle the Nile?
Documentary review: Dugout
Endurance kayaker Freya Hoffmeister on her paddle round South America
