Jemma Harding first realised the seriousness of her injuries when she woke up in hospital after 12 hours of surgery and saw the look on her dad’s face. ‘He’s normally quite a relaxed person. I saw him at the end of my bed and thought: “Oh god, this is really bad”,’ she says.

In 2008, when she was 28, she was working in London as a producer and director for television, mostly at MTV. Cycling to work across the notorious accident hotspot, Blackfriars Bridge, a lorry turned left across her and dragged her under. The experience changed her life completely.

‘For a long time, I felt that me before the accident and me after the accident were two very different people. Before this, I’d never even broken a bone. I was a fit, strong person and suddenly I couldn’t even clean my own teeth,’ she says. She had to lie flat for a month, as still as possible, because she was undergoing a delicate reconstruction surgery process on her right calf. Her pelvic bones were ground down from being pulled along by the lorry. She lost two stone in three weeks because of a damaged liver, had a stomach that felt as if it was full of broken glass and was frequently nil by mouth. ‘When you go from being very self-sufficient to being totally dependent on others, it’s a big shock.’

It also left a lot of time for thinking. She quit her job – ‘I was just done with TV’ – and when she was sufficiently recovered, moved back to Dorset to work on her dad’s sheep farm. She got a collie puppy called Jinx, who was a big part of her journey back to fitness. Jemma had to get up to let the dog out and feed her and the walking distances increased as she got older. ‘She was the best therapy for PTSD as well – a real comfort.’

As well as the extensive damage to her body, things were tough mentally. She became highly conscious of her scarring and went from being unafraid of wearing hot pants or little dresses to favouring floor-length skirts and even covering her scarred wrists. ‘I would not show any flesh at all. Even at the beach, I would wrap a towel around me until I lay down.’

Then she discovered Health & Injuries and lifting weights. ‘Within a few months, I went from feeling ashamed of my body to being absolutely amazed by what it could do,’ she says. About six months after the accident, she was back on a bike, but only on pavements to the local town, ‘just so I felt I hadn’t been defeated by it’. But one thing led to another. With the people she’d befriended at her gym, she began to take on some bigger challenges.

She did Chase the Sun, a 205-mile one-day bike ride across the south of England, from the Thames Estuary to Weston-Super-Mare. In 2022, she was the only woman in a team of 10 riders covering over 800 miles in 10 days between Sandbanks in Dorset and St Tropez in the south of France, raising money to support people affected by the war in Ukraine.

Despite these achievements, she says that she doesn’t identify as a cyclist. ‘It’s just something that I do to challenge myself and help with my fitness. I’d say it’s taken me a while to call myself a runner, but I do think I am one now.’

That may be so, but some might say she skipped a few steps on the running journey. Since the accident, a lack of forward Best wireless headphones combined with persistent knee pain has meant that anything over the shortest distances is uncomfortable. ‘I’ve wanted to run seriously for about the last five years. Sprinting is fine and intervals are fine, but any distance over 3km is a no and it’s driven me mad,’ she says. Amazingly, that didn’t stop her from finding out about the Beyond the Ultimate Jungle Ultra in the Peruvian Amazon on a podcast – a five-day, 140-mile, self-supported journey through barely trodden terrain – and entering the 2024 edition.

What made the difference was training with her partner, a Marine, who taught her to walk as required. ‘Walking is not failing – walking is strategy,’ she learned. She realised that she was covering useful distances on her feet by simply working with her sheep every day.

Having almost given up after the first two days, which turned out to feature a large amount of knee-aggravating road running, she thrived in the actual jungle and finished the June challenge as the second female. She coped with a nasty spider bite, clothes that never dried, skin damage from her pack rubbing her lower back and the fact that any time she touched a branch, her arm would instantly be covered in biting ants. ‘I’m used to being out in the elements, crawling through hedges trying to rescue sheep. The big jungle days were quite oppressive and a lot of people really struggle with it, whereas I absolutely loved it.’

Having surprised herself with that success, there’s no stopping her now. She did the Maverick Jurassic 100K in October 2024 and the 46-mile Montane Summer Spine Sprint South is coming in the summer of 2025. ‘As I got stronger, I found this reverence for what my body had been through and what it was capable of doing. I became really proud of it. Now I’m thinking, what else can it do? Where can I go next?’

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