This month we are thrilled to be speaking with athlete, author and advocate Emily Chappell. We sat down with Emily to chat about creativity, exploring new cities, and getting to know yourself again when health isn’t on your side.

Earlier this summer we also joined Emily, Rapha, Peak Queer Adventures and a group of awesome riders for High Camp, a three-day bike-packing retreat in the Peak District.  The event was aimed at creating a space for LGBTQ+ riders to dip a toe in bikepacking culture, make new friends and enjoy a long weekend in the great outdoors – and to enjoy a brew outside, of course.

Hi Emily! Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I always struggle with how to describe myself, because I don't have one of those job titles that rolls neatly off the tongue, it’s always a paragraph. But essentially, I try to do what I can to improve the spheres of the world that I exist in, which are cycling, the outdoors, and literature.

I started out as a bike messenger many years ago. I wrote a book about my years as a messenger, called What Goes Around. This led me into the world of long-distance bike touring. I cycled across Asia and did some trips in the deep winter in Iceland and North America. Then I got into Ultra distance racing, which was very much like bike touring, but just on fast forward and not sleeping as much! My second book, Where There’s a Will, is about this journey, how I got into ultra-distance racing and what happened when I did.

These days I still cycle a lot and do quite a lot of work hosting rides or events and interviewing authors. I also write a weekly newsletter, which takes a lot of my time, but it is one of the most rewarding things I've done for years.

What does your day-to-day look like at the moment?

For most of my adult life I haven't had any sort of solid routine, especially when I’m away regularly travelling. At the moment since I'm at home, my day-to-day consists mostly of laptop work; writing the newsletter, doing emails, planning trips, and coming-up with new ideas, and then getting outdoors to exercise as much as I can in between.

I've recently moved to Sheffield and exploring my new city and getting to know South Yorkshire is just one of the highlights for me at the moment. I think there's been an interesting movement in recent years where people who've done great big, flashy international trips, coming home and think, you know what, I can expend a lot of time exploring a 1-mile radius of my house. With the hangover of the pandemic keeping us closer to home and a much greater environmental awareness now, it has reminded us that it’s quite important to get to know where you live. So I'm somewhere on that trajectory at the moment!

Tell us how you first came across Kickback…

At the beginning of 2024, I led a series of rides in partnership with Rapha called Northern Creative, and we were lucky enough to come to the Arches in Altrincham as part of that. The idea came from a range of conversations with Rapha, partly that I’ve been living with long Covid for a while which really slowed me down, and so I just simply have not been able to go out and smash it like I used to be able to. And what was brilliant is that Rapha, who is a longstanding partner of mine, was just so accommodating and made an effort to find a way to carry on the partnership in a way that didn’t involve damaging my health.

 I have also been wanting for a long time to just try and move myself a bit more in the direction of being more creative. I've been talking about bikes professionally for well over 10 years now, which is great but there are other sides to me. And ultimately there is a limit to how much you can say about bikes!

 There was a real sense of wanting to create something that people can do within the bike community that doesn't necessarily involve having to keep to a certain pace on a ride or having to cover a certain distance. It worked really well for that perspective, because we had all sorts of people who joined us of quite varied abilities, and it just was not a problem. Going slowly into the world was the best way of connecting with that creative side.

What does it mean to be outdoors to you?

I have this constant tug days on sunny days when I’m sitting at my desk feeling guilty about not enjoying something because I just want to be outside. I feel like outside is just where I'm supposed to be. Although, I don't know what it is about human psychology, but getting up and leaving the house is often very difficult. But of course, whenever I go out on a long bike ride, or even a short bike ride, I never, ever regret it - it never doesn't make me happy!

What about when personally you don't feel so good on the bike, how do you manage that feeling?

Well, that's been interesting because I've had that for the last couple of years when my lungs just did not do their job and I would get very, very fatigued. So if I did manage to do a bike ride, I wouldn't go very fast and struggle on the hills, and then I'd be in bed for a couple of days, which was both confusing and frustrating, as though the laws of physics had changed. I felt almost like I’d taken it for granted that I really understood my body and how it worked.

 So it took a long time to get to know the new physics of this new body. But one thing I did realise, to my great relief, is that I didn’t experience the terrible downward spiral that I know a lot of elite athletes live with when they've lost the main driving force in their life. It meant I could do a heck of a lot more reading and writing, and proved to me there is another side to my personality, which is quite a relief because I was a bit worried I backed myself into a corner!

How has your relationship with the outdoors changed and evolved?

So I grew up in the country, which in many ways meant having the idyllic childhood of running around in fields, climbing trees and going off on my own. But then I didn't really have much relationship with the outdoors during my early adult years. It was when I got back into cycling as an adult when I was about 24, I started cycling in London as a way of commuting and then became a career, and it became my only identifying feature really. But being central London a lot of it was urban time, concrete, traffic people and all of that, but also sitting in parks and looking at trees and getting to know birds – I made excellent friends with a Robin one year! So that’s what got me used to being outside all the time and bizarrely what got me into cycling, even though objectively London's a terrible place to cycle.

Fast forward to now, I'm at the stage where I love going out into the Peak District or anywhere else I happen to be and getting to know the landscape. I'm really enjoying getting to know all the little bits and pieces of nature and the world that you find in the back streets of Sheffield, exploring all the little parks and trails and bridleways and canals. So it's an ever-evolving thing, and I think that's one of the reasons I've stayed so obsessed with cycling outdoors, is that it's always changing and it's always different.

How would you define the word adventure?

A few years ago, there was a bit of low-key argument going on in the adventurer sphere about what actually is an adventure and who's an adventurer. I mean, if you're going to the shops, I'm happy for that to be your adventure.

 For me, adventure is doing something that I haven't done before - something unfamiliar and that has a sense of the unknown. It tests my curiosity about something, wanting to find out what will happen. It can be going along the path and realising ‘oh no, this is a terrible idea’. Adventure doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s the not knowing that is what makes the adventure.

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Read her books!! 

Where There’s A Will & What goes around