After going through 11 rounds of unsuccessful IVF, Jessica Hepburn gave her life a new focus as she turned to adventure. Little did she know her challenges would later see her make history
She might not describe herself as being the ‘sporty one’, but Jessica Hepburn’s achievements say otherwise. As the first, and only, woman in the world to complete the ‘The Sea, Street, Summit Challenge’, Jessica, 54, has swum the English Channel, completed the London Marathon and summited Mount Everest – all of which have given her a newfound sense of adventure.
“I’ve always hated exercise. I still hate exercise. Nothing’s changed. But these adventures have changed my life. I’ve always described myself as the arty one, not the sporty one. I wanted to be an actress when I was little, but I wasn’t a very good one, so I ended up running a theatre,” she tells The Mirror.
“I like it when people say I am sporty, but if you asked any of my best friends from school, they’d say, ‘yeah, she’s not sporty’.”
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For any self-confessed exercise haters, opting to take on such huge challenges doesn’t seem the obvious thing to do, but for Jessica, it came out of heartbreak. As she navigated the grief of recurrent miscarriage, unsuccessful IVF, and a relationship breakdown, the Save Me From The Waves author used adventure and plenty of episodes of Desert Island Discs as a distraction.
“The fertility journey in a nutshell started when I was 34. I’d met my partner, got an amazing job and we threw away the contraception. I thought we were going to get pregnant immediately but we didn’t. After a year we went to a fertility clinic and we were diagnosed with unexplained infertility which means they didn’t know what was going on,” Jessica explains.
“We went through a total of 11 rounds of IVF, which is really quite at the extreme end of the spectrum. I seemed to be able to get pregnant, but I would lose the babies and I’d have lots of miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. It was a horrible time in my life. Not just because of all the sadness, but there was a lot of shame as well. I felt like my body couldn’t do what so many women around me seemed to find easy to do.
“I didn’t tell anyone what I was going through, which is very common. I was very secretive about it because you think that next month you’ll join the mummy club too and you’ll finally get the double lines and it’s going to work out. It was a really, really dark and difficult time and it went on for a decade.”
Then, at the age of 43, everything changed. After remembering a conversation she’d had with a close friend while in their late 30s, the writer and fertility advocate stopped trying for a baby. From that moment on, she decided to take on a very different challenge.
“I was with a really good friend of mine from university and we were having a meal and she said to me, ‘Jessica, it’s all about the number 43. If you haven’t had a baby by the time you’re 43, just get on with the rest of your life’ because 43 is a really significant age really in female reproduction,” she says.
“Just before my 43th birthday, I went through my 11th round of IVF. It was unsuccessful again and at that moment I thought, you know what, it’s not going to work. I’d lost a decade of my life and I needed to do something different. Then I had this mad idea to swim the English Channel.”
Having loved swimming as a child, and having dreamed of completing the swim one day, it was a dream that Jessica hadn’t thought about for three decades. “That was the beginning of what became this adventure which changed my life and then just led to these other adventures,” she recalls.
“I hadn’t ever swum in open water, I’d never run, let alone climb mountains. It just came out of all that heartbreak really and it has changed everything. That’s why I’m such an advocate for the power of adventure.”
Having taken on the momentous challenge with no previous experience prior to training, it’s no surprise that stepping foot in France was a joyous moment for Jessica.
“It was my happy ending. I’d been longing for this happy ending, which was a baby, for so long and then I’d thrown myself into something completely different that I realised I might not be successful in and was out of my control too,” she explains.
“I was really badly stung by jellyfish all over my body, all over my face. Then it took me five hours to land. It was a really, really epic swim. I describe it as like my version of giving birth because you hear about people giving birth who go through all that pain of labour and then when they have their baby, they forget all the pain. It’s euphoric. It was a bit like that. The moment I stepped foot in France, all the pain was eclipsed. It was perfect.”
As well as listening to every single episode of Desert Island Discs throughout her training and adventures, something she calls its own challenge, Jessica notes that wanting was the thing that kept her going through those harder moments.
“Going through 11 rounds of IVF was my training for swimming the Channel, running the London Marathon and climbing Everest. It’s a mental and physical endurance test. In a way I was doing all the training for that but also, I really wanted it,” she says.
“With Everest, I had what I described as three attempts on the mountain. The first year the mountain was shut during COVID, then I didn’t summit the second time and then, I went a third time. You only keep going back if you want something. It’s become a really important part of getting over the fertility journey.
“People also ask what I’m doing next, but I feel like those big adventures are done now and what’s next is going to look very different. Adventure is a way of life, but I’m looking for a different type of adventure now.”
As a result of her achievements, Jessica became the first, and so far only, woman to complete ‘The Sea, Street, Summit Challenge’. That is, she swam the English Channel, completed the London Marathon and summited Mount Everest.
“It’s amazing to have the record really. First of all, I’m the most unlikely adventurer. I also did it in my 40s and 50s. That shows people that if you really want to do something, you can. Hopefully it inspires other people,” she says.
“It is extraordinary that no other woman has done these three things. I think that is because they are very, very different and require very different skills. That makes me feel quite proud actually.
“I feel like as a midlife woman who’s done a range of different types of adventures, I can champion that there is a place in the world for people who want to do different types of adventures.”
Having made history with her adventures, written several books, including Save Me From The Waves, and become an activist, Jessica says that she hopes to inspire other people to turn their sadness into something better.
“It’s not going to make up for the fact that I haven’t had a baby. You know, it doesn’t take away that sadness. That sadness is something that I will carry all my life. But it has helped. We’re only here for such a short amount of time on this planet. It’s a terrible world, but it’s also a wonderful world. We all have sadness, all of us, and it’s how you take the sadness in your life, whatever it is, and turn it into something good for yourself and other people,” she says.
“That’s what I believe in and that’s what I’ve tried to do. The sadness is still there, but I’ve also created an amazing life out of that sadness. It’s not happened in spite of it, it’s happened because of it. Without that sadness I wouldn’t have done all these amazing things. Isn’t that wonderful? I have this phrase you know, ‘your s**t is your superpower’. Hopefully it can inspire others to turn their s**t into their superpower. That’s my mission in the world.”
Save Me From The Waves by Jessica Hepburn is out now.
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