Breakaway Didn't Start as a Business Idea

There's a photo on my phone I keep coming back to. Me, mid-ride, somewhere in the middle of the country. Loaded bike leaning against a gate, grey skies overhead, and a grin that probably looks a bit daft given the weather.

From the outside, it looks like a bloke having a brilliant time. From the inside, it was something quite a bit more complicated than that.

I didn't see it coming

I was two days into a four-day cycling trip - home-to-home; Bedfordshire to my childhood semi up north. 250 miles of open road with a loaded Trek and nothing but time. I needed it because I'd just been made redundant, and if I'm honest, the news had hit harder than I expected.

There were the obvious practicalities - the mortgage, the job search, the conversations I wasn't looking forward to having. But underneath all of that was something harder to name. An overwhelming sense of unfairness, coupled with a fear I wasn't quite ready to admit to. What was going to happen now? What if this was it - the end of the road?

I was carrying a lot, and I felt stuck with no obvious way forward. So I did the only thing that made sense at the time. I got on my bike.

Getting on the bike

I didn't set off with any great plan beyond putting one pedal in front of the other. But somewhere over those 250 miles, something started to shift. The thoughts that had felt tangled and heavy began to untangle - not in any dramatic, epiphany kind of way, but gradually, quietly, over miles.

Research from Stanford tells us that we're 60% more creative outdoors, which in retrospect explains a lot. At the time I just knew that the movement was doing something the stillness couldn't. The fear became more manageable. The questions became less paralysing. And slowly, a path forward started to feel possible - even if I couldn't yet see exactly where it led.

What I had, without fully realising it, was the thing that's genuinely hardest to find when you're carrying a senior role: real space to think. Not forty-five minutes squeezed between meetings, not a Sunday evening with half your mind already on Monday morning. Proper space, moving space - the kind that comes when you take your body somewhere your mind can actually follow.

What if the space was part of the work?

In the years since that trip, I've worked with a lot of leaders navigating their own crossroads - questioning whether to keep going or find something new, whether to accept the status quo or look for a different path. And one thing I kept noticing, again and again, was that the quality of someone's thinking seemed directly connected to the quality of the space they had to do it in.

A coaching room can be a powerful place. I've had some genuinely meaningful conversations over a cup of tea in a fairly unremarkable setting. But it has its limits, and I kept coming back to the same question: what if the coaching itself could offer people something closer to what that bike trip gave me? What if the environment wasn't just the backdrop to the work, but part of it?

That's where Breakaway came from

Breakaway is a coaching experience built around movement - side-by-side, outdoors, on bikes, for two to three hours rather than the standard sixty-minute session. It's not a cycling club and it's not a wellness retreat. It's a serious coaching conversation held in the kind of environment where, in my experience, serious thinking actually happens.

The physical and the mental working together, with fresh air and sustained exercise doing things for your thinking that a chair in a room simply can't. If you're navigating a transition right now, feeling the weight of a role that's pulled you in too many directions, or just quietly wondering what's next - this might be exactly the kind of space you've been looking for.

Before I fully launch in May, I'm looking for two or three people to help me shape this. You'd get a preferential rate and a genuinely tailored experience, and your input would help me build something worth sharing more widely.

No big pitch, no slick deck - just a conversation. Drop me a message if you're curious, and if you'd like to understand more about how I work, you can read a bit more about my approach here.

What would 250 miles of thinking space open up for you right now?