Sunday, 1 September 2013

Champion Adventure Racer Heather Dawe at The Bookcase

Heather Dawe is Heather Dawe is one of the UK's leading endurance athletes and is making a personal appearance at The Book Case on 10th September as part of the Walk and Ride Festival. She will be talking about her book Adventure's in Mind.

A climber since her youth, an obsession with wild places and the mountains was engrained in Heather's DNA. Moving to Leeds to study, she began to compete in fell races and mountain marathons, joking in the pub one night that she could race at the highest level.

Being hit by a car doing over 40mph while cycling would have ended many athletes' dreams, but Dawe's drive pushed her even harder. Hard enough to make her pub joke a reality, hard enough to win Elite Mountain Marathons, to win the Three Peaks Cyclo-cross race and to complete the Bob Graham Round. Pushing harder still, she entered the Tour Divide – racing the 2745-mile route of the Continental Divide in North America as she to sought to discover her physical – and emotional – limits.

Dawe writes of what it takes to compete in adventure races; the training, the sacrifice, the mistakes that must be made in order to learn and develop. An intensely deep and personal book, Adventures in Mind explores what drives a woman – living with her partner and their child, working 9–5 – to push so hard and so far; into herself, and into the wild.

Heather Dawe holds the female record for the Old County Tops fell race in the Lake District, won the Helvellyn triathlon in 2007, and has run the Bob Graham Round in under 22 hours. She has finished first female in the Fred Whitton Challenge twice, and in 2008 won the renowned Three Peaks Cyclo-cross. Spending her childhood in Bristol, she has lived in West Yorkshire since she was 18. She spends her days working as a statistician and systems architect in Leeds and lives with her partner and their young daughter.