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to achieve above our usual standard. For new Cantabrian Emma Timmis, if the challenge is anything short of extraordinary, then it is not a challenge. Emma is an adventure athlete and artist who applies her structure of motivation to every feat she attempts: set the goal, realise the goal, no matter what it takes.
Among her adventurous challenges, Emma was the second person ever to run the Freedom Trail in South Africa; the equivalent of 57 marathons over 55 days. She then returned to Africa and ran the equivalent of 94 marathons through four countries, in three months. ‘My morning routine would involve a whole-body examination from bottom to top, just to make sure my joints were still functioning,’ she recalls.
Some of her challenges have contained an eccentric element to them. In Australia, she hooked a trailer full of provisions to an ElliptiGO – a hybrid bicycle-elliptical trainer – and pedalled her way across the whole country in 74 days, stopping at schools along the way to share her story. She also roller-skated across the Netherlands, just to prove that an adventurous challenge can be cheap, simple and close
moved to Christchurch and is now sharing her journey of self
actualisation by authoring and illustrating a children’s book.
to home (Emma previously resided in the UK). As a part of these feats, Emma has raised thousands of dollars for causes concerning animal welfare, female education, and small community empowerment. But an unfortunate physical setback has recently sidelined Emma from her record-setting dreams, so she has had to leverage different skills to satisfy her ambitious nature.
In that vein, she is currently authoring, illustrating and featuring in her own children’s book, which tells of her second journey through Africa. ‘The writing has to rhyme for the story to be interesting to a four-year-old audience! I would also like for my illustrations to provoke their curiosity; to generate a conversation with their parents about achieving things.’ Despite her daring and venturesome psyche, Emma describes her child self as introverted; somewhat ‘uninterested and uninteresting’ in demeanour, and certainly lacking in adventurous spirit. It took social causes to galvanise her as a young woman. She wants children of today to be inspired, instead, by their own imaginations.
Emma’s book is due to be published in time for the Queenstown Writers Festival in November.