How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - ON FINDING HOPE IN ADVERSITY… With Sir Chris Hoy and Michael Rosen

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

This week we’re revisiting two deeply moving conversations that explore what it means to find hope in the face of profound adversity. First, we hear from the 11-time world champion and a six-time Olympic champion, Sir Chris Hoy. He speaks with remarkable honesty about living with stage four prostate cancer, as well as the shock of discovering that his wife had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis during the same period. He talks about finding hope, and appreciating the small things in life. Then we hear from the legendary British children’s author, Michael Rosen, who reflects on the devastating loss of his son, Eddie, who died at the age of 18. He explains how talking about him now is in fact a relief. These stories speak to resilience, love and the ways hope can survive even in the hardest of circumstances. Whether you are personally affected, or know of someone going through a tough time at the moment, I hope these conversations offer comfort and a fresh perspective. Listen to Sir Chris Hoy’s full episode of How to Fail here: swap.fm/l/vkdUVszJnMghYNMSLFdO Listen to Michael Rosen’s full episode of How to Fail here: swap.fm/l/3lr5HOsDIw6hgOnD7vgc 🔗 LINKS + MENTIONS: Cancer Support UK: www.cancersupportuk.org Bereavement Support: www.cruse.org.uk Mental Health Support: www.samaritans.org and www.mind.org.uk Elizabeth’s Substack: theelizabethday.substack.com Join the How To Fail community: howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content 💌 LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories 👋 Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @howtofailpod @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod @elizabday Website: www.elizabethday.org Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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the amazing Sir Chris Hoy, who recounts receiving a stage four prostate cancer diagnosis and then discovering that his wife was living with multiple sclerosis. Despite this severe adversity, Chris says the experience transformed his understanding of love, of joy, and of what truly matters when life's fragility is unavoidable. Then you'll hear from the beloved British children's author Michael Rosen, who very sadly lost his son, aged 18. Michael talks about allowing himself to sit with that grief rather than trying to outrun it.

His experience is a salutary reminder that hope doesn't erase heartbreak, but sometimes in time, it can coexist with it and it can steady us as we learn to live on. First up, here's Sir Chris Hoy. Can you tell me about love and what you've learned about love through this process? The terminal diagnosis or any serious health diagnosis that brings into focus your own mortality, it really does help you to strip away all the stuff that's not important and to focus on all that matters. You know, that's the reason we chose that title for the book. It's, you know, stepping back, looking at the situation and realizing actually it's the people in our lives that matter.

And the intensity of that love, it just goes to another level. when you suddenly feel like it could be, you know, it could all be ending at some point. Yeah, I think in the last year I have a whole different perspective. The stuff that I used to get worried about, the stuff that I used to stress about, the small stuff, you kind of look at it now and you think, what was I wasting all that time for? And most of the time, the things that we worry about, the things we have, you know, anxious thoughts about, the things that wait you up at two or three o'clock in the morning, they're not going to happen.

Yeah, writing the book, it's, it's, it's, helped me process it all. When I started writing the book, I was in a very different place to where I am now, physically and mentally. And I believe that the writing process has helped me to get through that. And now genuinely feel incredibly positive. The number of dark days are few and far between now. And yeah, I think, you just kind of think, I wish I could have had this perspective, you know, a few years ago. But you can't look back. You've got to look forward. As you mentioned, now, you're a year. and a bit on from your diagnosis. How are you feeling physically right now? Remarkably well.

I mean, you look fantastic. Well, thank you. It's just, it's a hard one because you, you know, I was still exercising fairly, you know, intensely. I retired in 2013. So I was still riding my bike regularly. I was still lifting weights in the gym. I still had that kind of athlete's mentality of pushing myself hard when I was exercising. You know, I had maybe half an hour or an hour a day to squeeze some training in, if you can call it training. So I would push myself hard in that time, and that was just the way I did it. And therefore, when you started to pick up aches and pains, you assume it's because you're getting a bit older and it's just the body's way to tell you to slow down.

But in reality, it was actually secondary cancers. It was tumors all over my body, which had got into the bones. And so that instinct to push through pain was a bad one, really. but now having had chemotherapy, I've had chemotherapy, various medication I'm not on any painkillers now but I've got no pain

but feeling really good by far the best I've felt in the last year probably the last two years really and as I say mentally I've got through that initial grief and shock and horror of a diagnosis and you've realised that it's

not unique this is happening every single day around the country, around the world, countless families are going to do exactly the same thing. So my thoughts are with them, because there's no way to fast forward through it. You have to basically accept it and grind your way through, and it feels like it'll never get better.

But yeah, I hope, well, the book was written to show that even when you don't believe it, you can find hope eventually. It takes time, but you've got to be disciplined with the way you approach things. You've got to choose to not engage with the negative, which is impossible sometimes, impossible some days. But on the whole, if you can keep leaning into your family, into your friends, the people that are there for you, your loved ones, then you can get to a point where you can laugh again. You can enjoy music.

You can have fun again. And it's, I couldn't even listen to music. It was too triggering. I couldn't, nothing was a relief. You couldn't escape it. It was just this constant thought it was. the first thing you thought about in the morning when you woke up, you dreamt about it. It consumed every waking thought and sleeping thought. So to get from that stage, then glad to be here and

the here and the now. That book does take you very much on that journey as a reader. And I mean this as a compliment. I had to put it down several times and I was reading it because the emotions that you provoke are so overwhelming. I can't even imagine what they must have been like. actually to inhabit for the person going through them. And you describe the moment you got the diagnosis and sort of squatting on the floor, just not being able to breathe, because there was just this boulder of grief, it felt like.

And then by the final chapter, what I love about the final chapter is that you talk about how sorrow your wife has started hearing you hum again. That shift, that imperceptible shift over the space of those few months to going from this, just absolute shell to coming back to being myself again. And so stage one, two, and three, there is hope that you can cure it. Stage four, it's you're told this is incurable, but it is treatable.

You know, those words stick with you. In the space of a sentence, your world has changed. You know, everything that I had done in my sporting career mentally, you know, the tools in your toolbox to cope with pressure or to deal with difficult situations. at the heart of it was the notion that this isn't life and death this is riding bikes in anti-clockwise circles this is you know this is fun

and if you win or lose this race nothing's going to change you know no one's going to die this is just this is just basically a hobby and that's what you lean what I always used to lean into but here was a situation where it very much was life and death and then that you're kind of scrabbling around trying to find some solid ground to grab onto

to think well how do I process this? How do I cope with it? Incredibly lucky with the support I've got. I mean, Sarah is, well, she's a Samaritan, so she's a listener, so she's, she is an amazing listener in general, but she has the skills to kind of let you vent, to let you express your fears and not offer solutions, but just be there to take it all. But at the same time, you're realizing this isn't her talking to an anonymous person on the end of a phone. This is her husband that's talking to her. And so she, the strength that she showed

during that time was quite incredible. And yeah, you know, I had, well, Steve Peters, our psychologist from the cycling team. Don't we'll get on to him. Yeah, sure, yeah. I mean, he was, he has, and always has been, you know, since the first time I met him has been a really important person in my life. Yeah, he was very quick to try and help me stabilize the ship. And Sarah's support is all the more extraordinary when you consider her own diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, which you reveal in the book that she kept from you for a month because she wanted to protect you. And yet she seems to embody so much of what you're talking about, that sense of being lucky. Can you explain that? She had this tingling on her face, this numbness which had been there

for a while and she'd been to the doctor and the GP and back and forth. And she found out that she she has multiple sclerosis and she didn't tell me about it because for that first month it was just, I think her logic was, there's nothing that I can do or we can do at that time. She was going to, you know, receive

treatment and but telling me that at that stage where I was absolutely hanging on by a thread, I think she thought this, you know, there's, it's not going to help in, you know, in telling me the news. So yeah, I think it was late December or mid-december

when she told me and that's the point where it felt like, hang on a minute, what is going on? It felt it felt nightmarish. Even when she told me, she never had self-pity or there was no poor me or, you know, how awful this is. She would just like, this is what's happened. This is how, you know, I've got an appointment with the doctor for this. We're going to find out treatment options. Her strength was what kind of kept me going at that point. And the fact that she says, you know, which you constantly reminds me how lucky we are, because we both have a disease which there is a treatment for. You know, so many other things can happen where there's nothing you can do, there's nothing you can treat it with, and it's going to be a very quick and, you know, a quick and sudden end.

And when you have those dips, you remind yourself the here and the now, you bring yourself back to the present, you don't think too far ahead, you don't try and predict the future, you just go, well, right here, right now. when it was awful in the first few weeks and you'd wake up in the middle of night or you couldn't sleep in the middle of the night it was just this feeling of well the kids are next door they're warm, they're comfortable,

they're sleeping, they're fine, they're safe we're in a warm, comfortable, dry bed, we're okay and I think that was it was just this feeling of kind of grab on and hold tight and it will settle you'll get through the turbulence but yeah it was a tough time

but reminding yourself how lucky you are, how we all, you know, how lucky all of us are. It's not about being positive and every day jumping out of bed and saying everything's great, but just trying not to engage with the negativity and choosing, you know, not choosing that kind of mourning, complaining, worrying, just steering clear of that. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Starting something new can feel terrifying. Whether you're launching a new idea, brand, product or podcast, whatever it is.

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That's the powerful backing of Amex. Conditions apply. Is part of the reason you don't like failing at team sport because you don't like letting people down? Yes, I think you've discovered something there. Yes. Now that you've put it that way, yeah, I can't bear it. Yes, it's a great fear and connects with something rather terrible,

which is the loss of my son. So my son Eddie died of meningitis. And I suppose not a day goes by when I sort of feel that I've let the family down because he was staying with me. It was just me and him in the house. And I didn't spot that he had meningitis. And he just seemed to be a bit fluy. And I didn't spot that it was meningitis.

So there isn't a day that goes by when I do feel that I let him down and I let the family down. So that hurts, yes. Michael, I'm so sorry for that unassailable tragedy. And I read about Eddie during the course of researching this interview. And I wasn't sure whether to talk to you about him because I don't know what kind of pain that must be to carry. And I'm so grateful to you for sharing that. Do you like talking about him? And what does it feel like for you to talk about your?

son in this way? These days, it's absolutely fine and something of a relief because talking releases something. You know, this is why we have psychotherapists, psychologists, psychoanalysts and so on, is because there's a sense in which when thoughts are in your head, there is a way in which they're trapped, not all of them, but some of them, they are trapped or they feel trapped. And then when you talk, you let them out. release them. And we've got all sorts of phrases, talk it through, talk it out. We've got all sorts of

phrases that mean that. And so with Eddie, at the beginning, I couldn't talk about it. I was genuinely suffering. But now I have all sorts of memories and things and the whole family talk about him. His girlfriend, she was then. We write each other letters and talk about it. And the other day, I found my dad's poem that he wrote for the funeral that the Jamaican poet James Berry read at the funeral. And that was just amazing because I hadn't been able to find it. All I could remember was one line from it. And I was feeling frustrated and kind of a bit sort of sense of deprivation. I couldn't find the poem because it had been so good.

In fact, just hang on one second. I could reach across. Oh, we'd love that. It's on the shelf. Just hang on. Okay. There may be a little, right, yes, I've managed to get it. So it's in an envelope in which my father, it's got my father's address on it,

and he's written on it, Harold's poem. So here we are, and it's in his handwriting and typed. So here is what he wrote. Grandson Eddie, larger than life, filling the frame of the doorway in his hockey goalkeeper's gear, a giant from outer space, larger than life. Eddie in his arsenal shirt, acres of it across his chest, stroking it with his great hands. Eddie, with his first watch in the Natural History Museum, checking the time every minute in charge of the rendezvous by the dinosaur, making sure there was still some time left. Nowhere near enough time, we now know, larger than life, but not large enough enough.

Goodness. That's such a beautiful poem, and it gives such a sense of him. Absolutely. And I sent it to Eddie's girlfriend the other day because she wouldn't have known it or had it. I don't think she had a copy of it anyway. I say Eddie's girlfriend. I mean, she's gone on to lead a life, obviously, because this was a long time ago. And she wrote back straight away saying that the image of Eddie was exactly as she remembered him.

Yeah. Great poem. Do you believe in an afterlife of any sort? No, we are the afterlife, and I take great comfort from that. That's to say, the afterlife is the memories and the physical remnants of the person who's gone, whatever remnants they are. I don't mean that in bits of their body as such, though, of course, atomically speaking, they are there without being mystical about it.

The body and what remains of it remains atomic. around. The atoms and molecules are there. But the remnants in our minds of everybody who knew Eddie, and then also physically, you know, I've got his shoes. They're just on the other side of the room here, believe it or not, in a box, and I get them out every now and then. I've got all sorts of things. There's a little photograph of him playing with his stepsister, just up there on the bookcase. I've got some Duplo people sitting on the shelf there, and one of them, I seem to remember. But me and Eddie decided was Aretha Franklin. So it does actually look a little bit like Aretha Franklin.

The hair, definitely. And I seem to remember we'd sit there going, You make me feel like a natural woman. Eddie was a very funny bloke, I should say. There's also a Jewish thing. There's what's called a Yortzite candle, which technically I should have lit every year, but I haven't.

Yotsate means year time, literally in Yudish Yorzate. That's there. So there's all sorts of remnants and then all sorts of events as well. So, for example, the guys who used to play hockey with, they have a hockey match every year in memory of Big Eddie, and they even try and encourage me to get on and hit the ball. I always miss. So there's all sorts of ways in which the afterlife is here and now.

Thank you, Michael. What a profound and helpful sentiment. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker. I host a podcast called A Slight Change of Plans that combines behavioral science and stories. storytelling to help us navigate the big changes in our lives. I get so choked up because I feel like your show and the conversations are what the world needs, encouraging, empowering counter programming that acts like a lighthouse when the world feels dark.

Listen to a slight change of plans wherever you get your podcasts.