#352: Conquer Your Own Mountains: Andy Smith's Inspiring Journey from Sobriety to the Tour de France

It is my utmost pleasure to welcome you to episode 315, 2018 my interview with none other than Andy Smith. Welcome to the podcast.

Yo, are you ready to flip the script on life? Because those bad days, they're just doors to better days.

And that's exactly what we do here at Grit, Grace, and Inspiration.

Your host, Kevin Lowe, he's been flipping the script on his own life, turning over 20 years of being completely blind into straight up inspiration, motivation, and encouragement just for you.

So kick back, relax, and let me introduce you to your host, Kevin Lowe.

Andy, man, what a pleasure to have you here today. Welcome to the podcast.

Yay. I'm so glad to be part of this.

Following your story, what an inspiration.

And one of the best things about doing what I do now is I get to meet people like you.

So, yeah, look forward to having a great chat.

Oh, man. Well, thank you so much, man. That means a lot to me.

So let's kind of take us back kind of to childhood.

I always love to kind of get an idea. And I think in your story, you know, it's going to be pivotal to just kind of understanding leading up to, you know, the events of your life.

And so take me back, talk to me about where you grew up at, what life was like for you as a kid, and we'll work from there.

Amazing. Yeah. I mean, I was born in the north of England.

And when I was seven years old, we moved up to the Shetland Islands, which for those of you who are not sure where that is, it's a small group of about 100 islands that is basically forms the northernmost part of the UK.

It's sort of on the way to Iceland, sort of adjacent with Norway and very, very remote part of the world.

I grew up on the island of Bresse, which is about seven miles by three, 300 people on it.

And in the early 70s, when we moved up there, it was like stepping back into a different century.

There was no car ferry.

If you wanted a car on the island, you had to befriend somebody with a fishing boat who would crane it onto the deck and take it over for you.

And just an extraordinary place for a young guy to grow up.

Very free to go and do what you wanted. but not, I guess, by a lot of people's standards, maybe people who've grown up in a city and things like that.

There's not a lot of things to do, so you kind of have to make your own entertainment.

No cinemas. There was only one TV channel when I was growing up.

Yeah, so you really were left to your own devices in terms of how you passed your time, but a spectacular place, loads of wildlife, life, grew up messing about in boats and fishing and going and working on the local farm and all this kind of thing.

And I guess one of the things that had come to define my life, a huge drinking culture.

I actually grew up in a big old house that we moved into that was more or less completely completely derelict.

And there was, I think, about two usable rooms in this big three-story house, about eight bedrooms, and the ceilings were hanging down.

And it was quite an interesting place.

There was rabbits living in it. There was rats, you name it.

And so we fixed that up and turned it into a guest house and a pub.

What could possibly go wrong for a young guy in that sort of situation.

Very, very happy childhood, but from quite an early age, developed quite the taste for what I would call the Shetland diet, which was Tennant's lager and McEwan's export beer washed down with copious amounts of whiskey.

So from probably about 13 years old, I was very much sort of embraced that culture.

It was good fun, lots of interesting times, but everything sort of revolved around alcohol, whether it was a dance at the local hall or whether it was watching people in the pub, which was my home, where our very livelihood depended on people consuming copious amounts of alcohol in our house.

So it kind of had quite a big impact on me, I think, culturally to sort of realize that in order to prove yourself as a man, as it were, that as a young man growing up, that.

You're the size of your manhood was measured by how far down a bottle of whiskey you could get before you either threw up or fell over, basically.

So it was quite the baptism of fire.

And very much one of the sort of the phrases was, if you couldn't had your drink, as they would say up there, then you were a bit of a failure.

And that carried with me throughout my whole life of this kind of desire to sort of prove myself.

And, you know, drinking was a big part of that.

Yeah. Wow. How old were you when you would finally move away from there?

So I went away to university when I was 18, went to Edinburgh, the capital, and studied physics at uni.

But again you know quite a big part of being a student certainly in Scotland is having a good time party party party and my folks I'm very grateful that I'm 58 now and my folks are still alive and they still live up there so we're actually looking at a holiday to go up and it's a place that is very dear to me in terms of I think there's something very special about growing Growing up on an island, you very much can sort of walk the coastline.

You feel part of the landscape, as it were.

I always make a point of when I'm going home of just touching the ground.

And it feels very special that you have this thing that is quite separate from, you know, the islands around it, but actually is also connected underneath the sea.

So it's a very, very special place. but I live in England now.

I've spent most of my professional career living in various different parts of the UK, but it's where I consider to be home. Yeah.

Oh my gosh. I mean, it sounds absolutely just beautiful.

In every sense of the word. What a magical place and so amazing that you still get to go back there today and experience it with your parents. I absolutely love that.

And yeah, and it's a very beautiful landscape.

It's a sort of place that on a beautiful day, I would really challenge any place to be a more beautiful part of this planet.

But the weather, obviously, given where it is, is a little mixed shall we say uh it's quite funny when people go to visit they might say oh why are there no trees uh around here and you say well come back in september and then you'll realize that basically any tree worth its salt is going to get blown flat and yes you know very windy very wet so lots of long dark nights all the more time for drinking really it's yes wow Wow.

Now, one thing I was kind of curious about growing up in this type of culture, in this environment, did you always intend on going away to college or did you ever think about not going to college?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I think I was probably steered by my parents.

I think particularly my dad, who was keen for me to pursue further education.

I was, I was pretty bright at school, did very well in all my exams, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do.

So physics was my sort of passion.

It was what I was good at and it made sense to go and study that at university.

And, and it's interesting as a father now myself and having, you know, experienced sort of trying to encourage my kids to go and pursue pursue their passions.

I think my dad saw what was sort of potentially a, uh, you know, a good adventure for me and sort of encouraged, cajoled, kicked me to go and pursue this.

Yeah. So I kind of drifted, I drifted into it.

And to be fair, I've probably not really been back living there full-time since cause just career and things like that now is, is taking me to other parts of the, of the country. Yeah, absolutely.

I love it. What career path would you end up taking after college?

So I, I, I went into one of the big sort of blue chip retailers.

A company called Marks and Spencer in the UK into their sort of management training scheme, which was a quite a good grounding.

But then I went to get a sales job in the pharmaceutical industry.

And that's probably where I've spent most of my career in healthcare and gradually becoming more senior in management roles, running divisions of pharmaceutical companies.

I've run dental companies, veterinary companies.

So it's just been kind of interesting how I've always...

Sort of drifted towards the healthcare side of things.

And given what I do now, it's just, it's kind of funny how life sometimes gives you little clues along the way around where maybe your destiny may lie.

And I find myself really putting some of the experience in my kind of earlier career to good use in terms of what I'm doing now.

Yeah, I love it. You know what? I, I love that because I often say that I feel like lives or each of our lives are like a jigsaw puzzle.

And, you know, all along the way, pieces, they start getting fit together.

And many times we don't take an opportunity, though, to ever try and look at things from a big picture until much later on.

And I think a lot of times when we do sit back and look at a big picture, we can see exactly like what you said, where there were little clues.

Lose. There are little things when you look back on life that have led you to this place.

Well, I love the movie Slumdog Millionaire. You've probably come across it.

And I just love the kind of the narrative that everything you go through in your life, good, bad, and indifferent can have meaning somewhere further down the road.

And I think it's one of those things that as you you get older, you start to see the value in painful experiences.

You start to see the value of people who come into your life and they're there for a reason. They're there to teach you something.

And sometimes those lessons are uncomfortable and sometimes they're there to inspire you to go and do other things.

And sometimes it requires a passage of time in order to really understand the value of that.

Yeah, absolutely. Talking more about kind of the alcohol side of your story, because I know I know that's really going to kind of lead us through really the rest of our of our conversation.

Will you talk to me a little bit more about that of it's just impact on your your daily life, maybe even career wise?

I would love to kind of hear a little bit more about that. Yeah.

And, and I think, you know, when I was younger, alcohol was very, it was very exciting.

It was something that you did with your friends. It was a kind of a social glue in absence of things like going to the movies or going to the bowling alley and things like that. None of these things existed.

So we would just sit in a little shed somewhere and sit and drink and do various different things.

And I kind of carried that narrative through the rest of my life.

And then when I started working, and I was away, working away from home, maybe feeling a little bit isolated, alcohol, again, felt like a bit of an antidote to loneliness.

I became more and more senior in my roles.

And I found that I was using alcohol a lot in terms of relaxation.

I was using it in terms of entertaining and it just became quite all-encompassing there were very little or very few parts of my life where alcohol didn't play a certain role and and it was fine for a while and then obviously you get in a relationship you get married kids come along and all of a sudden you start to feel that there's a slight shift there's a slight evolution where far from being the kind of the fun thing alcohol just starts to become something that's getting in the way and

it's interesting how people will twist a narrative on things and i certainly did that and i was very successful i broke records i won awards for my coaching and influencing and management skills and, you know, was perceived as a real high achiever within the industry that I was in.

When I moved into dental, I completely rewrote the rule book in terms of what was possible, took on a poor performing company and transformed it.

Did the same when I went into veterinary. And all the while, I just told myself that to go and drink myself to sleep, basically, let's just call it that, on the sofa every night was...

The actions of a high achiever. I work hard. I play hard.

I remember when I got my first sort of big job in the retail company after leaving university, my manager at the time, and we're going back to the kind of mid 80s, the late 80s here.

And he was very much, you know, well, you need to work hard and play hard.

So I just took him at his word and assumed play hard meant just go out and, you know, obliterate yourself with alcohol.

Don't get me wrong. I did lots of other things as well, which were great fun and things like that.

But there was just this kind of general presence of alcohol in my life.

I got married, a couple of amazing kids who are now 18 and 21.

But then that marriage failed and alcohol was a big part of that.

And I was I was deeply unhappy in the marriage.

And it became my go to in terms of coping with that.

That and and obviously I think anybody who's listening to this who's been married to somebody who drinks heavily would also understand that there is a real sort of difficulty that that goes with that so we just we were in this situation and where I was unhappy so I drank more then things would happen which made me more unhappy which meant I drank more and you end up in this kind of crazy cycle.

And then that marriage ended and I moved on, met this amazing new woman, Louise, and we ended up having a, having a child together.

Who's now he's 10 as we speak to this.

And I tried to use that sort of change in my life as an opportunity to to really have a look at myself.

And I did for a little while. And then I remember once Louise kind of saying to me, do you need to really be drinking as much as you are?

And she came at this from a place of love.

My ex came at it from a position of judgment. And I think when people are kind of really quite critical and things like that.

Anybody who's struggled with any kind of addiction, even though you are doing something that on the face of it seems like a choice and you're kind of enjoying doing it.

Actually, I think anybody who's really struggled with this would openly acknowledge that you feel terrible about yourself.

Each day you say to yourself, right, today's going to be different.

I don't want to wake up like this tomorrow morning.

And you're full of good intentions and you go through the day.

And then about lunchtime, the excuses start to kind of creep back in as to why maybe you could maybe just have a little drink and whatever.

And then, hey, presto, off you go again. And you wake up again the following morning.

And it's like the movie Groundhog Day. You just think, I seem to be unable to break the cycle.

And I think if you've ever been in that situation, it is a deeply uncomfortable state of affairs. I used to wake up every morning hating myself.

So if anybody were to judge me on that, I literally, I was full to capacity of self-loathing.

And so I would be very defensive about it.

And, you know, I would almost kind of stick two fingers up. It's like, well, you know, if you're going to criticize me for my drinking, then just watch.

I will go and, you know, really go to town and I'll give you something to criticize me for.

But Louise was very different. She just came at this from a position of concern.

Of love. And just, I guess, a general sense of, I want you to be around to be a dad for our young son. You're a good dad.

I see how you are with your older children.

And, and I'm just really frightened that you're not going to be around for them.

And, but even then that wasn't enough for me.

It took me to get to quite a dark place and bearing in mind, you know, this is a guy who who was a supposed high achiever.

I think to look on the outside, looking in, this is a guy who's got the big flash company car, the nice house, you know, looks like he's got it all under control.

And yet on the inside, I was, I was just in a terrible state and I was on antidepressants.

I mean, there's some irony there, you know, drinking something that is an addictive depressant each evening, only to wake up to take a tablet, which is an antidepressant in the morning, is a special kind of habit reserved for people who are struggling with this.

But it all kind of came to a head where I was getting a lot of health problems.

I was struggling with gout, which I think a lot of people kind of smile or smirk when you talk about gout because it's seen as kind of self inflicted, a bit of a slightly comedy disease.

If you've ever struggled with gout, it is the most most painful thing that I have ever experienced.

I got it in both knees and both ankles and gout in your knee is, it's a bit like somebody ramming a hot poker into the joint and twisting it every time your leg moves.

And it is, it is very difficult to cope with. I was on painkillers, I was on preventative medication.

And the only thing that would make me feel better if I was in the middle of an attack was to get drunk. It was the only kind of painkiller.

The irony was after I quit drinking three months later, the gout disappeared and I was able to come off the medication.

But at the time when you're in the, in the moment, it was, it was terrible.

And I'd had a medical, I, uh, my blood pressure was through the roof.

My cholesterol was through the roof.

I was pre-diabetic and I just thought, wow, this is, this is not how I thought I would be at 50 years old as it was at the time.

And, and then it all kind of came to a head with, uh, I was, I was in a, uh, our local supermarket and I had a panic attack and I, I'd never really had a panic attack.

I'd had times, you know, I was living with a lot of stress and anxiety, but I thought I was having a heart attack. Uh, my skin was on fire.

My heart was racing out of my chest and I started to lose consciousness.

And I actually fell into one of the fridges in the supermarket, and was sort of helped up by this little old lady, this little frail old lady who's, you know, I'm a big guy and she kind of helped me to kind of sit up and, and she said, are you okay?

And I was trying to make excuses like I'd slipped or something like that.

And I remember I said, oh, just give me a minute. I'll be okay.

And I sat there and I will never forget this moment of just sitting, looking at the floor and going, what are you doing here?

This is crazy what you're doing. And so...

That set me off on a little bit of a voyage of discovery.

But again, with the absence of anything, I'd been to AA.

I went to a few AA meetings and I just couldn't get my head around the whole live a day at a time for the rest of your life.

And the fact that I was there with people who'd been going to these meetings for years and years and years, and they didn't look to me like they were any further forward than I was.

And I thought, well, what I'm hearing here was a lot of, you know, sad stories for sure.

And there were some people who were in a terrible situation.

And so my heart went out to them, but I just thought But knowing what I know about problem solving in the business world, this does not make sense to me.

It does not resonate with me at all because there is no kind of place that I've been to before where just sitting talking about a problem ever solves it.

And and so I went to a few meetings and there was a really sweet old lady.

She bought me a book and and she said to me after a couple of meetings, she said, oh, do you, you know, how are you getting on? What do you think?

I said, you know, I don't think this is right for me. And she kind of went, oh, that's because you haven't hit rock bottom yet.

And, uh, I was like, well, that's kind of why I'm here. So I don't, you know, that doesn't, so that doesn't happen.

And she was sort of saying that this was your kind of entry ticket that you had to lose everything.

And sure enough, the people that I was in the meeting with were, you know, very few of them were working they didn't seem like they had particularly happy and fulfilling lives they were just kind of getting by and i i've kind of said with my tongue in my cheek in the past that i felt a bit like i'd gone to weight watchers and only to be told that i wasn't fat enough yet you know when you're 500 pounds and you you've had a heart attack then we can help you and and so i left that and thought okay the the

answer must be elsewhere but i just couldn't work it out until i kind of got my own head around what might work for me and there was one very interesting day so not long after the incident in the supermarket i was running late and i was running the veterinary company at the time.

And I really did not get on with my boss.

I'd completely, I was brought in to turn the business around.

The business had gone from declining at 30% per year to growing at 80%.

And yet this guy just had a real way of belittling everything that I was doing.

And I'm a big boy. I...

Didn't think that it would get to me, but it really did. And it really damaged my self-confidence. I was drinking more and more and more.

And then one morning I was up early, showered, got a long drive ahead of me, got in the car, driving to go and get on the motorway.

And this journey takes me past the railway crossing.

And as I was driving up, I was about a couple hundred meters away and the lights started to flash that indicating that the barriers were about to come down so i started to pick up speed i put my foot on the accelerator to go and try and beat the barriers and as i got closer i slammed on the brakes i was just like what are you doing you know this is this is insanity to go and try and beat the train so i kind of screeched to a halt at the barriers and sat there kind of stewing in my own juice knowing i was going to be late

for this meeting, anxiety levels through the roof.

And then a very interesting thing happened. And I was sitting there and listening to the radio and the Michael Jackson song, the man in the mirror came on.

And I've heard that song hundreds of times before, and I'd never really listened to it and kind of understood what the lyrics were all about.

And that line in the chorus where it says, I'm starting with the man in the mirror and I'm asking him to change his ways.

My entire life changed on one word, asking, because I'd spent literally 37 years beating myself up about the fact that I was drinking too much and all this kind of stuff.

And this moment when I was looking at my reflection in the rearview mirror I just literally asked myself a question I just said are you willing to do what it takes to sort this out once and for all and it was almost like somebody else answered me back from the mirror and just went yeah I'm ready and it was the first time I'd really kind of meant it and then that set me off on quite a voyage of discovery to basically learn what I needed to learn in order to put this to bed once and for all.

Wow. What a profound moment.

And isn't it crazy how moments like this happen in the most just unlikely of situations and places, sitting, waiting on a train, listening to Michael Jackson and you have this moment.

That's incredible. And also, I think that's kind of how life is, isn't it?

If you think back to times when things have really shifted, they have rarely been, I think, or certainly for me anyway, but also with the people that I work with, they rarely are things that kind of creep up on you little bits at a time.

They tend to be fairly impactful moments of generally quite high emotion as well.

And yeah you know sometimes things will just snap into place and you just think actually i i i've had a moment of clarity here and it's funny that didn't give me the answers that i needed but it just made me ask a different question and somebody i was listening to an interview with somebody and they were talking not about alcohol but they were talking about when you're battling against yourself.

He said, it's a bit like playing tennis and you're on both sides of the net.

So it doesn't matter how hard you serve the ball, the ball will come back just as hard.

And your opponent knows your every move. They know what, whichever shot is coming, they know how to respond to it.

So you end up in this kind of war of attrition where you're both levering the ball backwards and forwards over the net. and it's a zero sum game.

And that, that is how I felt at the time.

But then there's this person that was being interviewed, said a really interesting thing.

They said, well, but what if you beckoned that opponent over onto your side of the net and you became a doubles team, you would be invincible because you would know exactly what the other party was doing. You would barely even have to communicate.

You would add value to each other and you'd be unbeatable.

And that, for me, I think kind of gives me the essence of the man in the mirror moment.

It was just, I finally beckoned myself onto my side of the net.

And it started a very different conversation around what if I got curious rather than full of guilt and shame, what could make a difference?

I just, I felt hopeful, probably for the first time in 30 years, that actually maybe, just maybe, I could do something about this. Yeah.

Hope. Isn't hope, it's such a powerful feeling for us to have hope.

So the question we want to know is, what happens when the train finishes?

Well, so this was interesting. I called my boss and said, look, I'm not well, which was not a lie, let's be clear.

And I said, I need to take a few days off. And I went back, went back home and said.

I just thought, you know what? I think the answers are within me.

And I went back to everything that I'd learned about selling and influencing, about coaching, about things like NLP and thought field therapy, tapping, all of these things I'd learned kind of incidentally throughout or as part of my career.

And I just thought, you know what? I'm really good at changing how other people feel about things.

What if, again, that phrase, what if I was to apply this to me?

What would I do if somebody came to me looking for help with this?

What would be the process?

So I live near a little lake and it's got a little car park in it.

It's a very beautiful little spot. And I literally piled everything into the car.

And I spent three days from dawn till dusk with everything spread out over the dashboard, over the seats, on the floors and everything.

And there was something quite interesting about being in a car because I thought the answers are in here.

I just need to find them. And it gave me some real focus. Now, literally after three days, I emerged with a plan.

And some of the things that I decided to push myself through.

I had tried before, but just as sort of single interventions, let's say, and they'd helped it a little bit at the time, but they'd not got me the outcome I was looking for.

And, but what I could see, I'd mapped this out, which was basically a sort of a seven stage process.

And it was like, right, okay, so we start here and then we'll do a bit of this and then we'll throw that in and then we'll do this because that's the right time for that bit it to happen.

And then we'll do that. We'll do that. And then that will set us up for a strategy for kind of moving forward.

And so I just made a commitment to myself to start at the beginning, work my way through each part of it and not quit until I got to the end.

And bit by bit, as I went through it, I could feel, and it's, I love, you know, that you acknowledge these kind of moments and there were just little clicks, just little moments of clarity where I was like, Like, ooh, that feels differently.

And I remember going back in St. Louis at the end of the third day.

I said, you know, something's happened here.

I can't quite explain it, but I think I've really...

Made some progress here. And she kind of side-eyed me and kind of went, yeah, okay.

You know, actions do indeed speak louder than words.

And I couldn't, I couldn't make her understand what was going on in my head, which is fine.

Nobody can see what's going on inside anybody else's head, but I just felt optimistic.

And I felt really clear about kind of where I was going.

And days turned into a couple of weeks and I'm like, you know what, I'm doing okay here.

And bearing in mind, I was all the baggage that I had from growing up in Shetland around you're a failure if you cannot drink.

That meant that I didn't want to give up altogether.

I just wanted to take a break. I wanted to feel better because I felt miserable.

I felt sick and I needed to make that go away.

But actually, now I look back on that with hindsight, I realize that that was a good thing because it meant I didn't put myself under too much pressure from the outset.

I was just, again, coming at this from a position of curiosity.

And I was like, right, okay, well, if I took a break, how might I feel?

And so days turned into a few weeks. And I remember one morning, probably six or seven weeks in, I woke up, I'd slept really well.

And I woke up and I just went, my God, I feel amazing.

And, you know, don't get me wrong. Every morning is not like this for me.

As I often say, it's not all butterflies and unicorns in Andy world.

But the interesting thing was, I just thought, I can't remember the last time I felt like this.

And I I thought, I don't want to let this go.

It's too profound. It's again, it's a moment.

And I thought I could choose to go back to being that guy that was sitting in the fridge and in Tesco supermarket contemplating all of his life choices, or I could feel like this. And it seemed just like a no brainer to me.

And, and that was when I really sort of committed to, right. I'm, done with alcohol. I've had every hangover. I've had every embarrassing experience.

There was one night I sat when Louise was away with our son, I was sat on my own and I drank a bottle of wine and a liter of gin, which is a lot by anybody's standards.

And I couldn't square away the fact that when I woke up in the morning and I was.

Staggered down to the kitchen and I looked at the empty bottle, my overwhelming feeling was actually pride I was like look go me you know I've fulfilled my destiny of being able to you know drink something that would kill somebody and I just thought wow how messed up is that and so I kind of went you know what I have nothing left to prove and I think that was the kind of final stage for me was actually I've done that I am happy to turn the page on that part of my life, I now realize that to not drink alcohol is not a sign of weakness.

It's actually a sign of strength because we're obsessed with it.

And things are changing.

In the seven years I've been doing this, I've seen a massive shift in people's attitudes towards booze.

I mean, in the UK, they reckon now one in three people under 25 don't drink alcohol at all.

And when I grew up if you couldn't remember the night before you would just kid yourselves that you'd had this great night and well it must have been mustn't it because I don't remember it whereas now I do have a theory about this that I think if you go out and get completely blasted now there is real jeopardy because when I was growing up nobody had a camera there was no feedback loop that suggested anything other than you'd had this amazing night that you couldn't remember.

Whereas now people will take a picture of you if you.

Lose control you know you're sick on yourself or you pass out in the corner of the nightclub or something like that and all of a sudden you look at the reality of the situation and you go actually i'm not sure i am having that great a time there or maybe i'm hanging off somebody else and i'm just look you know my eyes are bloodshot and i don't look like i'm particularly enjoying joy in myself.

So I think there is the jeopardy of humiliation of people sharing stuff on social media, but also there is that feedback loop where you can just kind of go, okay, that does not look like the amount of fun that maybe I was telling myself that it was. Yeah, absolutely.

Going from from drinking that much alcohol to stopping, I have to imagine it had to be so difficult.

Would you mind sharing with me a little bit of an overview of the next, you know, few weeks, months of not drinking and any maybe low moments or high moments that really stand out?

I think, I mean, obviously there's a physical element of it where, I mean, I was blessed.

I'm not, I didn't get, you know, huge kind of shakes and things like that.

My sleep was terrible for the first couple of weeks. I felt anxious. I felt irritable.

And so that side of it was tough. but actually i think the the biggest part of it was i've been drinking regularly since i was 13 years old and and here i am at the age of 50 going who is andy smith without a glass in his hand and you get a lot of kind of soul searching that goes on it's like right okay now i need to i need to learn how to relax without this stuff i need to learn how to socialize without this stuff I need to learn how to be fun Andy without this stuff.

And it's almost like you're starting again.

But when you learn this stuff and you kind of lean into these uncomfortable situations where you go out with your friends and you think, right, I'm not going to drink and I'm going to get questions.

I'm going to have to justify what I'm doing and things like that.

You start to see that, you know, everybody has very different views and takes on this.

Some people are, they'll put an arm around you and go, that's brilliant.

That's great. I've been worried about you for a while.

Some people are like, Oh God, are you just going to be, you know, picking us up on all the crap that we say or something like that.

And so you, you contend with a lot of different sort of reactions.

But as you start to take these things off, and you go through experiences.

Without this, and you realize that, oh, funnily enough, the world didn't end just because I wasn't drinking.

I mean, I'll tell you an interesting, very quick story. But there's a guy that I was working with last summer, and he's a big cricket fan.

We were working on his kind of ability to go to a cricket ground.

He was semi-retired, and he said, look, he said, I spend most of my summer days sitting in a cricket ground drinking lager.

And I need to find a new way to enjoy that experience.

He's a mad keen cricket fan. and so we did quite a lot of work and he was doing really well and then we had a call and he said oh he says i've got an old university friend i see him a couple of times a year and he is not going to be happy that i'm not drinking i was like okay good okay we've got a we've got a challenge here and so he was going to cricket ground up in birmingham called edge baston on the saturday for a test match and his mate was going to be there let's call him dave Dave and he said I'm just really

worried so we booked in a call we had a call on the Friday and then we we also penciled in one for the Monday to review how it had gone so on the Friday we literally were role playing out what he was going to say to Dave about all these kind of reasons for wanting to do it and and all this and he was really nervous about this and I was thinking about all weekend and I thought you know what I bet he's crumbled I bet this is going to be a step too far for him. He was really nervous about it.

So nine o'clock Monday morning, I call him up, ring, ring, ring, ring.

Hi. I said, so how did it go? And he just burst out laughing. And I was like, okay.

Um, out of all the possible reactions that I was anticipating, I did not see that coming.

I said, tell me more. And he said, well, I met Dave in the bar at 10 o'clock in the morning.

And i started with the speech that we'd worked on and he said i got about two or three sentences in and then dave just held his hand up and said i'll stop you there and then he said thank f for that and this really threw him and he's like okay and dave said he said i've been meaning to say something to you for a while he said it's great to see you and i really enjoy coming but you know and they would sit and get completely and utterly blasted together normally and he said the thing is it's great to see you but he

said i i go home in a right state he said my wife doesn't talk to me for six weeks afterwards um because i get myself in such a mess so they sat and they watched the cricket and this client of mine drank soda water and lime all day and dave had about three pints of lager over the course of the entire day my client gave him a lift home and and all was good. And we were just talking about that.

And he said, he said, here's the thing, Andy, he said, it's the best day ever.

We've had at the cricket for years. And so it takes real courage to follow your heart on this kind of stuff to kind of go, right, I'm going to grit my teeth.

I'm going to get my big boy pants on and I'm going to square into this.

So that conversation at 10 AM in the bar, he could have very easily choked and just gone, Oh, let's just have beers.

And Dave would have gone home to his wife and, you know, been sleeping in the spare room and all that kind of stuff.

And yet the, just the ability to have a different conversation.

And I think there's so much in this in terms of we build all this stuff up in our own mind to be one way.

And we're rarely right in terms of what the actual reality of the situation is.

And when I'm working with people, it's just really really interesting when I, you're starting to unpick.

I mean, a lot of this is about fear and it's like, well, what's this person going to see and how am I going to cope with a family wedding?

Oh, we've got a family barbecue coming up and what am I going to do?

And it's like, right, all we need to do is find the bravery to just see this through.

And then we've got some learning and invariably it's not what people think it's going to be.

And yeah, you know, there might be some people who are difficult and things like that, but generally it's not the fantasy that you've got in your mind.

I often jokingly say to people, you know, when they're talking about a family wedding and things like that, I said, what do you actually think is going to happen?

Do you think your family are going to pounce on you and pin you down and get a funnel and start pouring vodka down your throat?

No, you might get a couple of stupid comments, but then nobody really gives a damn.

And they will get on with their night. You'll get on with yours and it's fine.

But we build this stuff up. And it's so much of this is an exercise against your own fear because in your comfort zones, they are bounded by fear.

And the closer you get to the edge of the comfort zone, the scarier it is.

And it doesn't matter if it's a job that, you know, a big job promotion, which is loads more money that you're more than capable of.

You go in in through that process with am i am i good enough can i handle this am i worth it you know there's a great exercise that they did a number of years ago where they put a fake job ad in i think the new york times or something like that invited a load of people in for interview all of which were perfectly qualified for the job that was being advertised got them all in a room together.

And then somebody came out and said, Oh, just to let you know, before you go in for your interview, we're terribly sorry.

We've made a mistake with the job ad.

Uh, we got the salary wrong. And of course, everybody looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Oh, here we go.

We've been brought here under false pretenses.

They're going to tell us it's kind of half the money.

And they said, no, we, we actually missed the zero off the end of it.

So the $25,000 job was actually 250,000 and half the people walked out because they went, well, that's just not me, even though they were all qualified enough to do the job.

So, so much of this in life is around how do I get out of my own way?

And that was very much, you know, my man in the mirror moment and just coming up against my own fear.

And when you do that once...

You start to ask yourself very different questions in life. Yeah.

You know, the one word that you said that I keep coming back to is courage.

Yeah. And I look at this and I think it speaks so highly of this idea of courage within ourselves to make a change.

Courage of the guy to be the one to do something different, friend, to not do the norm, to, to, you know, be that, that purple, you know, striped zebra in amongst all of the black and white ones to go against it. It takes courage.

And yet what I love about it is sometimes if we can have that courage, look at the change that it made, not just in his life, but in his friend's life.

Yeah. You know? And I mean, and that's where I just, I come back to courage.

If we can adopt the courage to do the things that we know we want to do, that we need to do, the impact is just monumental.

Oh, absolutely. And when you learn sort of what works once, you do start to ask yourself different questions.

After I got sober, I started to ask myself questions.

Well, I've just done something that I thought was genuinely impossible for me.

What else have I talked myself out of that I would have always liked to have done in my life, but just listen to that internal voice that says, nah, you're not good enough. You're not strong enough.

You're not fast enough. You're too fat, too thin, too young, too old.

And I started to look around for other ways to sort of test this hypothesis is could I possibly be maybe a little bit better than.

I thought I was. And for me, it was when I rode the Tour de France on my bike.

And that was a very interesting part of this journey, because actually the metaphor between doing another thing that was, quote unquote, impossible for me.

Make no mistake, I am not a cyclist. You look at my picture, I am not built like these guys that do this kind of stuff.

But I had read a book back in, I think around about 2008, 2009, called French Revolutions.

And it was a journalist who went and rode the course of the Tour de France.

And he started off being fairly cynical about these guys and the brightly colored lycra and all this kind of stuff.

And it's a very funny book in terms of his experiences, but also the sort of admiration that he started to feel towards these guys in terms of the sheer enormity of what they were taking on.

I'd read this and I thought, oh, wouldn't it be so cool to do that one day?

And of course, now armed with a what's next kind of mentality, I just started Googling some things about ride the course of the Tour de France.

And I found a charity that did that very thing.

And I phoned them up and I said, look, I said, is this what you do? Am I reading that right?

You can go and ride the entire course of the Tour de France for this kids' charity that they have.

And they're like, yeah, that's exactly what we do. And I was like, wow, okay, I'd like some more information.

They said, well, I'll kind of stop you there because actually it's completely sold out. And this was, I don't know, late 2017.

This is when we were talking about the 2018 cycling season.

And the lovely Sarah at the charity said, but if you want, we can put you on the waiting list. And I was like, yeah, sure.

You know, here's my email address. Here's my, here's my telephone number.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not really thinking that anything was ever going to come of it.

And then about six weeks later, the phone rang and bearing in mind, I was starting to look after myself a bit more and I was down the gym and things like that.

And I'd lost a bit of weight and funnily enough, all of my health issues, both mental and physical were all starting to resolve solve themselves.

And so the phone rang and it was Sarah and she said, right, okay, Andy, well, this is the phone call you're either excited about or dreading, but somebody's pulled out. You're next on the list.

There's a place on the 2018 tour for you, but we need an answer in two hours.

And I was like, oh, okay, fine.

Thank you. Went away and had a chat with Louise about it.

And she said, she said, look, if you take this, would you put the training in?

I was like, yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. I need to because...

I am, you know, not a cyclist by any stretch. I didn't even own a bike, bearing in mind at this stage.

And then she asked me a very interesting question.

She said, okay, because I was now in a situation where I was going to have to say no, if I was not going to do it.

It wasn't just let the universe kind of gradually talk me out of it.

And she asked me a really interesting question. She said, if you say no, how are you going to feel?

And I said, well, I think I will regret it for the rest of my life.

And she said, well, there's your answer. And I'm like, yeah, but you know, it's three weeks and I had a young son and it's kind of, you're gonna, and she said, we'll sort all that stuff out.

Just if you've got to give them an answer, just tell them yes.

And we'll work it all out.

And boy, what an adventure that was. You know, I've read all the books.

I've learned all the theory about performance and things like that, but I'll tell you on the roads of France for three weeks in the summer of 2018, 18, I just spent the whole time going, oh, now I understand.

Oh, my goodness, man. What an amazing story.

Now, you got to talk to me. How long did you end up having to prepare before it started?

So I had about, I think, just a little over six months. OK, so which is enough.

I'm going to train through the winter and things like that. And, but building, building miles.

I remember the first time I went and rode 60 miles and I was destroyed at the end of it.

And I was on the one hand, I was like, this is great.

I've just done 60 miles. That's the furthest I've ever ridden.

Then on the other hand, I'm going, yeah, but you know, I've got to do three times this in terms of effort.

If you include the climbing, you know, every day for three weeks and it was like, oh, okay.

So sometimes you see a little bit of the enormity of the challenge ahead and by this point they'd announced the the route and i was looking at stage 12 which is what they call the queen stage which is like the biggest individual day and it's about 120 miles and about three quarters of the height of everest in terms of vertical in one day and i was looking at that and i was just I don't know how I can even contemplate doing that, but bit by bit, I got fitter and I got stronger.

And there's a, there's a hill that I used to train on near where I live.

And the first time I went out on a training ride, I did it, I think in 11 minutes and 23 seconds.

And, and I was like, okay, that's my benchmark. And so I just kept chipping away, chipping away, chipping away.

And every once in a while I would do a ride that would go and I would do that.

And the time was coming down, going down in nine minutes and then eight minutes.

And I was like, wow, this is pretty good actually.

And, um, by the time, probably two weeks before the tour, I went out to do my last kind of big training ride and I went and did it and I did it in five minutes and 50 seconds.

Wow. Isn't it extraordinary? Cause my body had put up with all the punishment and abuse that I'd given it for years.

And I was grateful that it endured that.

But actually now what I was doing, I was challenging it in a very different way.

And I was like, wow, this is like, I'm now going nearly twice as fast up this mountain.

Funnily enough, I went away and obviously did the tour. I lost 17 pounds in three weeks.

And just burning, you know, I turned myself into a candle and just burned all the fat out.

But I came back and even though I was full of cold after I got back, I thought, I'm going to try Remenham Hill again. And I did it in 507.

And I just thought, wow, I'm, I'm, I'm a different person physically now than I was back then.

And yes, it's been a journey, but I think a lot of the stuff about the, the tour taught me about when you, and I think the parallels for a sobriety journey are.

Are really valid in terms of whenever you think about the enormity of what you're trying to achieve, given that you've not done this before, you tend to get freaked out and you tend to sort of give up almost before you start.

So you need to have a way to stay focused, to break things down into smaller chunks.

Now people talk about, you know, smart goals and things like that.

I've I've never really kind of bought that. I think your goals should be unachievable, but you need to have something to focus on in the moment because I spent most of those three weeks thinking about the Champs-Élysées at the end of stage 21 and just overwhelming myself every time.

But every morning there was a guy that got up at four o'clock and signposted the route for the day and he put yellow arrows on the lampposts.

And and it just meant that when you came up to a roundabout or an intersection if the arrow said go straight on you went straight on if it said left you went left it went said right you went right you didn't question it because there was enough trust in his ability to signpost the route and it just meant that you didn't have to worry you just went okay what do i do today i'm just going to follow the yellow arrows and i'm going to keep turning the pedals and sometimes those revolutions of the pedals going up a mountain were really, really hard.

And sometimes you're zipping along through a valley with all your mates around you, and it's just joyous.

I think I worked out that I made nearly 1 million revolutions of the pedals, and every single one of them was necessary.

Some of them I loved, some of them I deeply hated, but they all got me to the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

And I think that understanding of there are good days, there are bad days.

Somebody advised me before we went to France that said, there will be days that you will wake up and you'll just go, I can't do this. And.

He said, he said, you'll just want to cry all day. And that's true.

It definitely got to that point.

And in those moments, it was like, right, just get on your bike and just follow the yellow arrows.

And if you follow the yellow arrows, you'll get fed when you need to be fed and you will have a bed for the night at the end of it, no matter how long it takes you.

So just get small and just, you know, really focusing on what the task is at hand.

And I remember at the top of stage 19, the final mountain stage, got to the top of the final climb.

And I went live on Facebook and, um, there was quite a few people were following my journey and my video blogs and things like that.

And I was like, Oh, here I am, you know, the top of the top of the mountain, we've got two stages to go.

There was a short stage, stage 20, uh, which was the time trial.

And then there was the ceremonial run into Paris stage 21.

And so here I was at the top of the the final mountain. And, and I was like, yeah, it's like, it's like being in a football game where, you know, it's, you're, you're two one ahead and you're soccer, obviously, um.

Two one ahead, but maybe there's three minutes of extra time.

And so, you know, you're in a really strong position, but you know, it's not quite done yet.

And for the first time I allowed myself the luxury of maybe just thinking that my god i have just ridden the course of the tour de france and i burst into tears and and it was embarrassing because i was live on facebook and i'm like and it was just such a powerful moment and i've watched that video again subsequent it was funny there was about 20 people uh watched it live and then i went back in the following day and i think it had something like one and a half thousand views or something i was like oh god on Andy Pride on Skidbrook.

But it was just the release of this kind of pent up emotion where I just thought, God, maybe I've finally done this.

And there were so many moments where...

Along the way where I came so close to just not completing.

And all that stuff just adds up to make it this massive thing.

And the following week, when Geraint Thomas, who won it that year.

Somebody stuffed a microphone in his face at the end of stage 20, because the final stage, it's sort of customary not to attack the yellow jersey.

So if you've won it at the end of stage 20, barring accidents, you've got it.

And somebody stuck a microphone in his face and said, Oh, how does it feel to have won the Tour de France and he burst into tears and I was like I know exactly how he feels um but obviously he did it uh even though we did it on the same schedule I mean that queen stage of Alpe d'Huez he finished it at you know three in the afternoon I finished it at 11 o'clock at night yes oh my goodness wow man your story is so incredible and in in And this story about the Tour de France is just absolutely unbelievable.

But that was honestly just the light of the match for where you would go after that.

And so before we get into where you would begin cycling after, what do you feel like you learned about yourself in those three weeks that kept you propelling forward of chasing after?

This this idea this dream this goal yeah oh great question boy oh how long you got well let me just i guess there's probably a couple of things i think one is the value of persistence i think it's when you cycle up a big old mountain it's something that the mountain has been there for millions of years and it's going to be there for millions of years after you've gone and how you choose to experience it is all on you.

The mountain just looks at you and just goes, all right, sunshine, let's see what you've got today.

And so you go to lots of different places in your head.

And I remember riding up the Calder Madeline on this infamous stage 12 and just the sort of, yeah, I can do it. I can do it. I'm feeling great.

And then, oh no, I can't do it. I can't do it. Then yeah, I can.

I'm feeling better again. Then, oh no, I can't do it. And, bear in mind it takes you two and a half hours to get up this mountain and by that point you're just kind of exhausted and it just you end up and just go like look just shut up and get on with it and i remember looking at a little kilometer marker about halfway up and and i was looking at i could see it up ahead and they they very helpfully put on these big climbs they count down how many kilometers to the top and i was looking at this kilometer

marker and i'm thinking i think it's 14 kilometers to go.

And then I'm thinking, nah, but I can't remember riding past the 15 kilometer one. So maybe it's 15.

And then I'm thinking, well, if I think it's 14, and then I get there and it's 15, I'm going to be crushed because I've got a kilometer more than I thought.

So I'm going to, I'm going to assume it's 15, because then if it is 14, then I've got a free kilometer, you know, and all this insanity is going on in your head.

And I'm sort of peddling away and this thing's, I'm like squinting and can I see it? Can I see it?

And I got there and it was 14 kilometers to go.

And I'm like, yeah, I've just got an extra kilometer that I didn't, you know, and it's such a mental game.

And you get to the top of this mountain and you look back down and you think, wow, two hours ago, I was right the way back down there looking up and thinking, I'm never going to do this.

And yet here I am looking back on where I was.

And there was a really cool moment bearing in mind this was the this was the day that got me out on my bike in the pouring rain it's like right okay you're gonna have to get out and do 100 miles because that's what you've committed to do and it's a horrible day and but you're just gonna have to get on with it because that day scared me enough to kind of give it the respect that it deserved and so went over the col de madeleine went over the col de la croix de fer the good old iron cross the biggest climb in the whole tour and

i was coming down we're heading to the most iconic climb of the tour de france alpe d'huez 21 hairpins and it's about the height of ben nevis in the uk about uh yeah about 1400 meters straight up and and i i got to the bottom i was i was riding up to the bottom of the climb and it was getting dark. It was about.

10 to nine at night when I got to the bottom of the climb. And I'm like, you know what? I'm feeling okay here.

And, and you're kind of looking at yourself and going, I never thought in a million years, I'd even be able to get this far.

And yet here I am about to start the final climb. And actually I'm feeling way better than I thought I would until I got to the final food stop.

So Yogi, the mechanic is there and he's got a mini bus and a big, big van with all this stuff.

So I pulled in and topping my water bottles up, grabbing a banana and sitting on the back of the van where all the guys who'd given up for the day and they're all looking at me as if to say, what's he going to do?

And I not considered quitting at all at any point during that day until I saw them.

And all of a sudden, something really interesting happened. All the excuses, my knees were sore, my wrists were sore.

And I was like, Oh God, you know, it's going to be two hours to get to the top.

It's nine o'clock at night.

This is a, this is a climb that most people would just come and do that one climb in the day.

You know, you've, you've already proven so much to yourself, Andy, nobody's going to be critical if you give up.

I'm like, wow, I've got this whirlwind in my head going on.

And it was funny that Yogi, the mechanic, he's kind of, you know, just helping me get a few little snacks and stuff.

And you obviously saw what was going on and you just went, you're right, Andy.

And I was like, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm okay.

And he went, good lad. And just to kind of snap me out of it.

And so I put my water bottles on the bike and, and it's funny, the minute I swung my leg back over the crossbar, I remembered why I was doing in this.

I was raising a load of money for charity. I was proving something to myself.

And I thought, you know what, if you don't do this, you're going to be the guy that rode most of the Tour de France, not all of it.

And so the minute I started turning the pedals, all this kind of noise just went away. And I'm like, yeah, okay, we're back on it.

And so I'm working my way up this, these 21 hairpins, it's getting darker and darker and darker. And eventually it's pitch black.

And obviously when you're in the mountains, curtains you know there are no there's no ambient light it's just completely dark i guess you know i'm talking to somebody who really really understands that and i you've just got this little pool of light in front of you uh maybe 10 feet across from your your light and you're going along and there's people driving past in cars and everybody's tooting you know they can see what you're doing and and nobody's being critical everybody you know there's kids hanging out windows and go,

go, go, go. And all this kind of stuff.

And, and then this vehicle comes up alongside me and it's Yogi in the driving this mini bus.

And he pulls up alongside and I can just make out in the glow of the headlights.

I can see his face and he just gave me a little nod, And I kind of nodded back and I turned, I looked and I could see all the guys who'd given up sitting in the back.

And I'll tell you, if you want to know what regret looks like, that it was etched on all of their faces.

And I'm willing to bet that any one of them at that moment would have given the choice.

It probably would have got out of the van and got back on their bikes again, but they made a choice at the bottom for all sorts of very good reasons.

Let's be clear, you know, and who knows, but it's just interesting that when you get these moments of doubt, these moments where you have to make a choice.

It's, is there a choice that is going to bring regret further down the line?

And what can you do to avoid making that choice?

And generally, and certainly for me, it's remind yourself why you're doing this.

You know, you have to have a really good answer to the question.

You know, why would I put myself through this?

And for me, it was, you know, I knew a lot of people were watching, so a bit of peer pressure was good but actually i i'd raised a lot of money for this kid's charity and i thought am i gonna have to give this back if i i don't do this climb and sometimes you're just clutching anything that you can use in that moment but i was i was 50 50 and it just took yogi to go you're right to just kind of shake me out of it a little bit and the minute i got back going i'm like no I made the right choice but I came really close

and yeah you know that is that moment changed me for the rest of my life because when you're presented with a a real dilemma like that let's call it it's yeah you learn a lot about yourself and I went on to ride slightly bigger mountains after the tour and lent back on all of this kind of stuff.

Because when you start to get up to even higher mountains, it really makes you call upon whatever is within you. Yeah, absolutely.

Man, so incredibly powerful. Not only just the story, but the mindset, this idea of choices, the idea of regret, so many powerful life lessons all contained within a three-week Tour de France journey.

Remarkable. Thank you. I would love, one of my kind of last questions today is, here you are, this man who.

You made a massive change, not just to stop drinking, but literally to go against basically your culture growing up, to go against everything you knew.

You then embark on this whole new journey of cycling.

You take on the Tour de France.

How does your life look different today than it did before that day at the train tracks? I think there's a bit of purpose.

I think, I think when you, you kind of suffer the way I did, and you transcend it, you get very keen to make sure that other people don't have to suffer the way you did.

And I'm enormously passionate about helping other people now.

And I think a lot of the cycling and the stuff, I've ridden my bike up to Everest Base Camp as well.

And I do these things for charity because I spent quite a lot of my life hating myself.

And I now do things that I would consider to be the antidote.

I like to do things that made me feel better about being me.

But I've always had a desire to help other people.

And I felt so frustrated and so angry at the kind of the ineffectiveness of some of the options that were available to me when I was looking for help, that when I got something that, you know, and let's be clear, there are no universal sort of panaceas for anything.

Anything, but something that would appear to be a little bit more up to date on this and perhaps more proven in the commercial world to work.

I just got super passionate about wanting to share that.

I got super passionate about wanting to challenge the narrative that your life gets worse when you're not drinking alcohol.

I wanted to show everybody that my life got better and better and better and better.

And just to give people some hope, whether you want to work with me or not, it doesn't matter.

I just want to plant seeds that make you think, actually, you know what, that guy made it and maybe I can too.

And it's been better than I could have possibly dreamed.

If somebody went back in time to 2016 and said, right, okay, Andy, in six or seven years time.

You'll have ridden the Tour de France. You'll have helped 6,000 people get sober.

You'll have ridden your mountain bike across the Arctic Circle.

You'll have ridden your bike up Mount Everest.

You will be pursuing going and doing a mountain bike race in the snow across Alaska. I would have...

Rejected that out of hand because you'd have been talking about somebody else and yet here we are and and that is just such a life-affirming thing to happen you go oh my goodness you know each time i push myself i you know don't get me wrong there are plenty of things that i can't do but actually i i exceed my own limitations every time i choose to do these things and in one of my favorite it quotes is that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond to it.

And, you know, bad stuff happens in life.

And my goodness, you know, when I come across people like yourself, who've dealt with the most extreme challenges and yet rise above it and choose to bring light to other people's worlds, you know, I get to spend time talking to people like you now.

And, you know, I don't want to be kind of like, sound like a total psychophant about it, but it's kind of, it's so different to the guy at the train tracks who was just getting by, who hated himself, who was probably in danger of ruining another relationship, who was...

Teaching his kids that life's just really hard.

And the only way you'll get by is to obliviate yourself every evening.

I teach my children much better lessons. My daughter is now a world famous actress.

My son has gone to university.

My youngest is just, makes me laugh every day.

And it's just life is, it's just different now.

And yeah, there are some things that you kind of go, oh, it'd be quite nice to go back to that kind of chaos or that, you know, just letting go and not having to kind of stare this stuff down.

And then you pinch yourself and you go, yeah, but boy, what, what an adventure I have opened up for myself here.

You know, riding your bike up Mount Everest is kind of something that not many people get to do.

And you just go, well, I've just created this opportunity for myself by virtue of the choices that I've made.

So, you know, if there is an overall message, I guess it's about choices.

For me, the very definition of addiction is, yes, it's a choice to drink or not drink.

But for me, I did not feel able to make the choice that I so desperately wanted to.

And actually to get back to the place where you feel like you can make a choice is very life-affirming.

I would argue it feels almost like a second chance. Yeah, absolutely.

Andy, I have one last question, but before I ask you that, will you please share with us how we can get plugged into your world, how we can keep up to date with what you've got going on, on where life is taking you, where can we send people.

So obviously my website is soberin7.com. So just all the words, soberin7.com.

All my socials on Insta, Facebook, I tend not to do much on the X.

You know, if you just search soberin7, you'll find me. And yeah, you know, things like the, I'll be keeping people up to date with the training for the Iditarod in Alaska.

I've got qualifying races to do this winter in Norway and Finland and places like that.

And you can go to the website, you can fill the form out and ask questions.

I've got a free web class on there where I talk a bit about my story and a bit more about the process that I followed to get sober.

So yeah, swing on by, you know, I'd love to chat with anybody who feels like maybe this has resonated, maybe this has struck a chord.

Maybe, you know, I was looking for somebody, and I think this is probably one of my disappointments with going to AA, I went there looking for somebody I could point at and go, I want to be where you are.

And I didn't find them. And so I want to be that guy for people.

I want to be the one that's like, you know what, actually, yeah, I might not want to ride the Tour de France, but I kind of like how he's transcended this.

And I like the fact, you know, I've got a lady, I get emails all the time with people who just do the most amazing things.

One lady, she rediscovered her childhood love of crochet for goodness sake and she's in my facebook group and we were all having a bit of a laugh about it and then she started putting some pictures up and i was like wow you're really good and then she sent me a message and she said andy i've just been contacted by my local college to be their crochet instructor on their arts and crafts and i'm like that is so cool you know and that is her tour de france and i get these emails where it's like andy you're not going to believe this dot,

dot, dot, dot, dot. And I'm like, try me. I will.

And when you shift your perspective, it's just interesting how different things start to show up in your life.

And I think overcoming an addiction can be just such a powerful metaphor for a turning point for anybody, but it's, it's scary to face down your own fears and that courage word that we've used a lot here today.

It's, it's about finding your own courage and, and it's not about.

You know, showboating. It's not about glory. It actually, when everybody said to me, Oh, Andy, you know, you're, you're such an inspiration, you know, when I was riding the tour and I'm like, yeah, but you don't understand.

I'm at the back all the time.

You know, there are guys there who are half my weight that are flying up the mountains.

And I, I, I'm like, I don't get it. Why, why would you think I'm an inspiration?

And someone explained it to me. It's because you're, you're in the struggle you're in the fight and if if i'd been uh you know a racing snake and 60 kilograms rather than 100 nod you know it probably would have been less inspirational because people would have gone yeah well you know he's a great cyclist and whatever but you know i'm the guy who didn't even have a bike when i signed up for it and and i think to watch people all enduring, I think is quite a cool thing.

So yeah, you don't swing by the socials and visit the website and get in touch.

You know, I'd love to have a chat with anybody that is struggling on this.

I feel extremely duty bound to just shine a bit of light into the shadows on this stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I will be positive that all of your links are all inside of the show notes today for easy access.

Process you kind of spoke to it a little bit you know touching on my my final question is speaking to the person who's listening to us today who maybe they haven't begun the journey, they're they're in the thick of it though they they're suffering from some type of addiction yeah what would you say to them it's okay to be scared and it's okay to feel like you can't do this.

If you've listened this far, you'll know that this can be a game of moments and you don't need many of them to make a big difference in your life.

You will get aha moments as you go through this.

Maybe you can work it out for yourself. I sometimes, you know.

Say, well, I had to work it out for myself, but actually I didn't.

I'd learned all this stuff. I just not put it into action.

If you need some help, if you need somebody to put an arm around your shoulder and go, you know what? It's going to be okay.

I'm here to tell you it's going to be okay.

Yes, there are tough moments, but they will be just that. There will be moments.

This This is not a 24-7 struggle. It's tough in the beginning, but actually it gets easier.

And just find something that resonates with you, whether it's me, whether it's AA or something else.

But just when something just starts to vibrate inside you and you go, you know what? I feel hopeful.

Just keep running with it. One of the best bits of advice I was given by an old boss of mine said, he said, if you're stuck in the dark and you see light at the end of the tunnel, just head in that direction.

Well said, well said.

Andy, it has been an absolute joy to have this time with you today.

Thank you, man, so much. It means the world.

Oh, and thank you so much for inviting me on. You keep doing what you're doing.

You know, we need more people like you in the world.

Just, you know, showing people what is possible.

How can you transcend difficulty with such dignity and grace as in your in your podcast?

It's wonderful. I love it. And I love you, man. Well done.

Thank you so much, man. So much for you listening today.

My hope, as always, is that today's episode didn't just entertain you, but hopefully it has inspired you.

It's empowered you. it's made you look at life a little bit different it's made you think what is my tour de france what is my thing my addiction that i need to overcome what is it that i want to do so that i can be in the position where andy is today looking back down the mountain to see where he's already traveled until next time this is kevin lowe with grit grace and inspiration.

Music.