Adventurer and motivational speaker offering inspiring, funny and challenging talks about his 4-year, 46,000 mile odyssey.

Alastair Humphrey's amazing stories provide a spectacular, original case study of self-motivation, setting small targets to achieve outrageous goals, the rewards of risk, the power of communication and trust, the magnificence of our world, and a call to arms that nothing is achieved without being bold enough to begin it. The lessons from the road.

Alastair Humphreys is an adventurer, blogger, author, motivational speaker and photographer.

Alastair’s quest for adventure began young. Aged 8, he completed the 26 mile Yorkshire 3 Peaks challenge and the National 3 Peaks in 24 hours aged 13. At 14 he cycled off-road across England. After leaving school Alastair taught for a year in South Africa.

Whilst at university (Edinburgh and Oxford) Alastair cycled from Pakistan to China, Land’s End to John O’Groats, Turkey to Italy, Mexico to Panama and across South America. He ran a charity project in the Philippines and the London marathon dressed as a rhino.

Since graduating Alastair has cycled round the world for 4 years, raced a yacht across the Atlantic Ocean,canoed 500 miles down the Yukon River and walked the length of the holy Kaveri river in India.

Alastair has also run the Marathon des Sables, (finishing as one of the ten fastest Brits despite breaking his foot during the race) and rowed to France with Major Phil Packer, a soldier paralysed in Iraq. In 2010 he completed an unsupported crossing of Iceland by foot and packraft.

To fight off the wanderlust back home Alastair managed a sub-3-hour marathon, had a miserable time during the Original Mountain Marathon, the Devizes to Westminster 120-mile canoe marathon and another one during Tough Guy. Travelling round the 2006 football World Cup in a camper van was much more fun, as was running with the bulls in Pamplona.

Alastair has published three books, with a children’s book due by the end of the year. (He has also written chapters for Lonely Planet’s ‘Flightless‘ anthology, the Adventure Cycling Handbook, Stanorama and The Traveller’s Handbook). He is a very keen photographer and has recently begun dabbling with making videos on a digital SLR.

After spending a year teaching 10-year-old boys in a school’s Special Needs department, Alastair is now training for the Bob Graham Round and preparing for SOUTH, the first unsupported return journey to the South Pole and the longest unsupported polar journey in history.

Alastair pays the bills through motivational speaking at businesses and schools, fulfilling a long ambition in 2008 by speaking to a full house at the Royal Geographical Society (listen to it here). Alastair is a patron of the charity Hope and Homes for Children.