Jessica Hepburn is a self-confessed hater of exercise and the cold, so it doesn’t seem natural for her to swim the English Channel and train to summit Everest (she’ll be the first female to achieve the Peak to Pond challenge if she accomplishes this).
Jessica’s background is in arts, becoming one of the youngest women to run one of London’s largest theatres – the Lyric Hammersmith – which she led for 10 years. But during her tenure, she was also leading a ’secret life’ going through round after round of unsuccessful IVF and multiple miscarriages in her bid to become a mother. Her first, best-selling book – The Pursuit of Motherhood – made her into one of the UK’s leading voices on fertility.
From this, she founded the international arts festival Fertility Fest and also started taking on some of the world’s most iconic physical and mental endurance challenges to raise awareness of her work (what she calls ‘adventure activism’).
She’s run the London Marathon, swum the English Channel (the subject of her second book: 21 Miles), and in 2020 was scheduled to climb Mount Everest to become the first woman to achieve the legendary ‘Pond to Peak Challenge’ (now postponed to 2021 due to Covid 19).
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