ON FINDING HOPE IN ADVERSITY… With Sir Chris Hoy and Michael Rosen

This week we’re revisiting two deeply moving conversations that explore what it means to find hope in the face of profound adversity. First, we hear from the 11-time world champion and a six-time Olympic champion, Sir Chris Hoy. He speaks with remarkable honesty about living with stage four prostate cancer, as well as the shock of discovering that his wife had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis during the same period. He talks about finding hope, and appreciating the small things in life. Then we hear from the legendary British children’s author, Michael Rosen, who reflects on the devastating loss of his son, Eddie, who died at the age of 18. He explains how talking about him now is in fact a relief. These stories speak to resilience, love and the ways hope can survive even in the hardest of circumstances. Whether you are personally affected, or know of someone going through a tough time at the moment, I hope these conversations offer comfort and a fresh perspective. Listen to Sir Chris Hoy’s full episode of How to Fail here: swap.fm/l/vkdUVszJnMghYNMSLFdO Listen to Michael Rosen’s full episode of How to Fail here: swap.fm/l/3lr5HOsDIw6hgOnD7vgc 🔗 LINKS + MENTIONS: Cancer Support UK: www.cancersupportuk.org Bereavement Support: www.cruse.org.uk Mental Health Support: www.samaritans.org and www.mind.org.uk Elizabeth’s Substack: theelizabethday.substack.com Join the How To Fail community: howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content 💌 LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories 👋 Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @howtofailpod @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod @elizabday Website: www.elizabethday.org Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Elizabeth Day?

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• 0:41Elizabeth Day?

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• 1:02Speaker 01

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• 1:08Speaker 02

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• 1:31Elizabeth Day?

  When we're younger, we believe that life is going to follow a predictable path. But the truth is that difficult situations have a way of arriving without warning. And it's often in those ruptures that we discover the resilience we didn't know we had. This episode explores how hope can emerge in the toughest moments, reshaping our sense of who we are. You're going to hear from the amazing Sir Chris Hoy, who recounts receiving a stage four prostate cancer diagnosis and then discovering that his wife was living with multiple sclerosis. Despite this severe adversity, Chris says the experience transformed

• 2:14Elizabeth Day?

  his understanding of love, of joy, and of what truly matters when life's fragility is unavoidable.

• 2:23Elizabeth Day?

  Then you'll hear from the beloved British children's author, Michael Rosen, who very sadly lost his son aged 18. Michael talks about allowing himself to sit with that grief rather than trying to outrun it. His experience is a salutary reminder that hope doesn't erase heartbreak, but sometimes in time it can coexist with it and it can steady us as we learn to live on. First up, here's Sir Chris Hoy.

• 2:57Elizabeth Day?

  Can you tell me about love and what you've learnt about love through this process?

• 3:01Speaker 03

  The terminal diagnosis or any serious health diagnosis that brings into focus your own mortality, it really does help you to strip away all the stuff that's not important and to focus on all that matters. You know, that was the reason, that was the reason we chose that title for the book. It's, you know, stepping back, looking at the situation and realising, actually, it's the people in our lives that matter. And the intensity of that love, it just, it goes to another level when you suddenly feel like it could be, you know, it could all be ending at some point. Yeah, I think in the last year I have a whole different perspective. The stuff that I used to get worried about, the stuff that I used to stress about, the

• 3:44Speaker 03

  small stuff, you kind of look at it now and you think, what was I wasting all that time for? And most of the time, the things that we worry about, the things we have, you know, anxious thoughts about, the things that wake you up at two or three o'clock in the morning, they're not going to happen. Yeah, writing the book, it's helped me process it all. When I started writing the book, I was in a very different place to where I am now, physically and mentally. And I believe that the writing process has helped me to get through that. And now... Genuinely feel incredibly, incredibly positive. The number of dark days are few and far between now. And yeah, I think you just kind of think, I wish I could have had this perspective, you know, a few years ago and, but you can't look back. You've got to, you've got to look forward.

• 4:29Elizabeth Day?

  As you mentioned there, you're a year and a bit on from your diagnosis. How are you feeling physically right now?

• 4:36Speaker 03

  Remarkably well.

• 4:38Elizabeth Day?

  I mean, you look fantastic.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Well, thank you. It's, it's, it's a hard one because you, you know, I was still exercising fairly, you know, intensely. I retired in 2013. So I was still riding my bike regularly. I was still lifting weights in the gym. I still had that kind of athlete's mentality of pushing myself hard when I was exercising. You know, I had maybe half an hour or an hour a day to squeeze some, some training in, if you can call it training. So I would, I would push myself hard in that, in that time. And that was just the way I did it. And therefore, when you start to pick up aches and aches and pains, you assume it's because you're getting a bit older and it's just the body's, you know, way to tell you to slow down. But in reality, it was actually secondary cancers. It was, it was

• 5:19Speaker 03

  tumors all over my body, which were, had got into the bones. And, and so that, that instinct to push through pain was, was, was a bad one, really. But now, having had, you know, had chemotherapy, radiotherapy, various medication, you know, I'm not on any painkillers now, but I've got no pain, but feeling really good, like by far the best I've felt in the last year, probably the last two years, really. And, and as I say, mentally, I've got through that initial grief and shock and horror of a diagnosis, you know, and you just realise that it's, it's not unique. This is happening every single day around the country, around the world. Countless families are going to do exactly the same thing. So my thoughts

• 6:03Speaker 03

  are with them because it's, there's, there's no, there's no way to fast forward through it. You have to, to basically accept it and, and grind your way through and it feels like it'll never get better. But yeah, I hope, well, the book was written to show that. Even when you don't believe it, you can find hope eventually. It takes time, but it's, you've got to be disciplined with the way you approach things. You've got to choose to not engage with the negative, which is impossible sometimes, impossible some days. But on the whole, if you can keep leaning into your family, into your friends, the people that are there for you, your loved ones, then, then you can, you can get to a point where you can laugh again, you can enjoy music, you can, you can have fun again. And it's,

• 6:48Speaker 03

  I couldn't even listen to music. It was too triggering. I couldn't, nothing was a relief. You couldn't escape it. It was just this constant thought. It was the first thing you thought about in the morning when you woke up. You dreamt about it. It consumed every waking thought and sleeping thought. So to get from that stage and glad to be here and, you know, in the here and the now.

• 7:10Elizabeth Day?

  That book does take you very much on that journey as a reader. And I, and I mean this as a compliment. I had to put it down several times when I was reading it because the emotions that you provoke are so overwhelming. I can't even imagine what they must have been like actually to inhabit for the person going through them. And you describe the moment you got the diagnosis and sort of squatting on the floor, just not being able to breathe because there was just this boulder of grief, it felt like. And then by the final chapter, what I love about the final chapter is that you talk about how sorry your wife has started hearing you hum again.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  That shift, that imperceptible shift over the space of those few months to going from this just absolute shell to, to coming back to being myself again. And so stage one, two and three, there is hope that you can cure it. Stage four, it's, you're told this is incurable, but it is treatable. You know, those words stick with you. In, in the space of a sentence, your world has changed. You know, everything that I had done in my sporting career mentally, you know, the the tools in your toolbox to cope with pressure or to deal with difficult situations. At the heart of it was the notion that this isn't life and death. This is riding bikes in antiquity circles. This is, you know, this is fun.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  And if you win or lose this race, nothing's going to change. You know, no one's going to die. This is just, this is just basically a hobby. And that's what you lean, what I always used to lean into. But here was a situation where it very much was life and death. And then that you're kind of scrabbling around, trying to find some solid ground to sort of grab on to, to think, well, how do I process this? How do I cope with it? Incredibly lucky with the support I've got. I mean, Sarah is, well, she's a, she's a Samaritan, so she's a listener. So she's, she is an amazing listener in general, but she has the skills to, to kind of let you vent, to let you express your, your fears and, and not offer solutions, but just be there to, to take it all.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  But at the same time, you're, you're realising this isn't her talking to an anonymous person on the end of a phone. This is her husband that's talking to her. And so she, the strength that she showed during that time was, was quite incredible. And, yeah, you know, had, well, Steve Peters, our psychologist from the cycling team.

• 9:37Elizabeth Day?

  All right, we'll get on to him.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, he was, he has and always has been a, you know, since the first time I met him has been a really important person in my life. Yeah, he was very quick to try and, and help me stabilise the ship.

• 9:51Elizabeth Day?

  And Sarah's support is all the more extraordinary when you consider her own diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, which you reveal in the book that she kept from you for a month because she wanted to protect you. And yet she seems to embody so much of what you're talking about, that sense of being lucky. Can you explain that?

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, or she had this tingling on her face, this numbness, which had been there for a while and she'd been to the doctor and the GP and back and forth. And she found out that she, she has multiple sclerosis and she, she didn't tell me about it because for that first month, it was just, I think her logic was, there's nothing that I can do or we can do at that time. She was going to, you know, receive treatment and. But telling me that at that stage where I was absolutely hanging on by a thread, I think she thought this, this, you know, there's, it's not going to help in, you know, in, in telling me the news. So, yeah, I think it was late December or mid-December when she told me and that's the point where it felt like, hang on a minute, what, what is going

• 10:57Speaker 03

  on? That it felt, it felt nightmarish. Even when she told me, she never had self pity, or there was no, for me, or, you know, how, how awful this is. She would just like, this is what's happened. This is how, you know, I've got an appointment with the doctor for this. We're going to find out treatment options. Her strength was what kind of kept me going at that point. And the fact that she says, you know, she constantly reminds me how lucky we are because we both have a disease which there is a treatment for, you know, you could, so many other things could have happened where there's nothing you can do, there's nothing you can treat it with, and it's going to be a very quick and, you know, a quick and sudden end. And when you have those dips, you remind yourself the here and the now, you bring yourself

• 11:40Speaker 03

  back to the present. You don't think too far ahead. You don't try and predict the future. You just go, well, right here, right now. When it was awful in the first few weeks, and you'd wake up in the middle of the night, or you couldn't sleep in the middle of the night, you know, it was just this feeling of, well, the kids are next door, they're warm, they're comfortable, they're sleeping, they're fine, they're safe. We are in a warm, comfortable, dry bed. We're okay. And I think that was, it was just this feeling of kind of grab on and hold tight and it will, it will settle. You'll get through the turbulence. But, yeah, it was a, it was a tough time, but reminding yourself how lucky you are, how we all, you know, how lucky all of us are. It's not about being positive and every day jumping out of bed and

• 12:22Speaker 03

  saying everything's great, but just trying not to engage with the negativity and choosing, you know, not choosing that, that kind of mourning, complaining, worrying, just steering clear of that.

• 12:38Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD, because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialised treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's Exposure and Response Prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable, so you can live more of the life you want to

• 13:23Elizabeth Day?

  live. If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NoCD can help. Book a free 15 minute call to get started at learn.nocd.com/fail. Is part of the reason you don't like failing at team sport because you don't like letting people down?

• 13:41Speaker 04

  Yes, I think you've discovered something there. Yes. Now that you've put it that way. Yeah, I can't bear it. Yes, it's a great fear and connects with something rather terrible, which is the loss of my son. So my son Eddie died of meningitis. And I suppose not a day goes by when I sort of feel that I've let the family down, because he was staying with me, it was just me and him in the house. And I didn't spot that he had meningitis. And he just seemed to be a bit flui. And I didn't spot that it was meningitis. So there isn't a day that goes by when I do feel that I let him down and I let the family down. So that hurts. Yes.

• 14:24Elizabeth Day?

  Michael, I'm so sorry for that unassailable tragedy. And...

• 14:31Elizabeth Day?

  I read about Eddie during the course of researching this interview and I wasn't sure whether to talk to you about him because I don't know what kind of pain that must be to carry and I'm so grateful to you for sharing that. Do you like talking about him? And what, what does it feel like for you to talk about your son in this way?

• 14:55Speaker 04

  These days, it's absolutely fine and something of a relief because talking releases something. You know, this is why we have psychotherapists, psychologists, psychoanalysts and so on, is because there's a sense in which when thoughts are in your head, there is a way in which they're trapped, not all of them, but some of them, they are trapped or they feel trapped. And then when you talk, you let them out, you release them. And we've got all sorts of phrases, talk it through, talk it out. We've got all sorts of phrases that mean that. And so with Eddie, at the beginning,

• 15:33Speaker 04

  I couldn't talk about it. I was genuinely suffering. But now I have all sorts of memories and things and the whole family talk about him, his girlfriend, where she was then, we write each other letters and talk about it. And the other day I found my dad's poem that he wrote for the funeral that the Jamaican poet James Berry read at the funeral. And that was just amazing because I hadn't been able to find it. All I could remember was one line from it and I was feeling frustrated and kind of a bit, well, a sort of sense of deprivation. I couldn't find the poem because it had been so good. In fact, if, just hang on one second, I could reach across.

• 16:16Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, we'd love that.

• 16:17Speaker 04

  It's, it's on the shelf. Just hang on.

• 16:19Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 16:20Speaker 04

  There may be a little, right, yes, I've managed to get it. So it's in an envelope in which my father, it's got my father's address on it and he's written on it Harold's poem. So here we are, and it's in his handwriting and typed. So here is what he wrote. "Grandson Eddie, larger than life, filling the frame of the doorway in his hockey goalkeeper's gear. A giant from outer space, larger than life. Eddie in his Arsenal shirt, acres of it across his chest, stroking it with his great hands."

• 16:57Speaker 04

  Eddie with his first watch in the Natural History Museum, checking the time every minute, in charge of the rendezvous by the dinosaur, making sure there was still some time left. Nowhere near enough time, we now know, larger than life, but not large enough.

• 17:19Elizabeth Day?

  Oh my goodness.

• 17:21Speaker 04

  So.

• 17:22Elizabeth Day?

  That's such a beautiful poem and it gives such a sense of him.

• 17:27Speaker 04

  Absolutely, and I sent it to Eddie's girlfriend the other day because she wouldn't have known it or had it, I don't think she had a copy of it anyway. I say Eddie's girlfriend, I mean, she's gone on to lead a life obviously because this was a long time ago. And she wrote back straight away saying that the image of Eddie was exactly as she remembered him. Yeah.

• 17:48Elizabeth Day?

  Great poem. Do you believe in an afterlife of any sort?

• 17:51Speaker 04

  No, we are the afterlife and I take great comfort from that. That's to say, the afterlife is the memories and the physical remnants of the person who's gone, whatever remnants they are. I don't mean that in bits of their body as such, though of course atomically speaking, they are there without being mystical about it. The body and what remains of it remains atomically around, the atoms and molecules are there. But the remnants in our minds of everybody who knew Eddie, and then also physically, you know, I've got his shoes, they're just on the other side of the room here, believe it or not, in a box and I get them out every now and then. I've got all sorts of things. There's a little photograph of him playing

• 18:36Speaker 04

  with his stepsister just up there on the bookcase. I've got some Duplo people sitting on the shelf there and one of them, I seem to remember me and Eddie decided was Aretha Franklin. So it does actually look a little bit like Aretha Franklin, the hair definitely. And I seem to remember we'd sit there going, you make me feel like a natural woman. Eddie was a very funny bloke, I should say. There's also a Jewish thing, there's what's called a yortzit candle, which technically I should have lit every year, but I haven't. Yortzit means year time. Literally in Yiddish, you'll say that there. So there's all sorts of remnants and then all sorts of events as well. So for example, the guys I used to play hockey with, they have a hockey match every year in memory of Big Eddie.

• 19:21Speaker 04

  And they even try and encourage me to get on and hit the ball. I always miss. So there's all sorts of ways in which the afterlife is here and now.

• 19:32Elizabeth Day?

  Thank you, Michael. What a profound and helpful sentiment.