Joy is...The Mission.
Another episode in the Friday 'Shining Light' series, platforming lesser known voices with incredible stories to tell.
Alvaro De La Camaro is an amateur triathlete, cyclist and father who has also happened to have ridden 2,500km from Croydon, London, to his native Cadiz, in Spain, in 10 days, all for a bowl of soup. To give some context, Alvaro is the co-founder of Cycling 4 Soup, a media platform documenting endurance challenges
to engage community, create connections, and to make sport (and soup), the binding agent to raise awareness for important causes worldwide. Although preferring challenges of his own design, Alvaro does compete, and, much to his self-confessed astonishment, he was the winner of the 2021 Ultraman UK. We also uncovered during our chat that the 2022 Croydon-Cadiz trip was really a warm up for a recent (undocumented) completely non-stop, self-supported cycle from London to Madrid in aid of Ella's Charity, working with women who have survived trafficking and sexual exploitation, which tested Alvaro's mental resilience to the limit.
Alvaro is an unbelievably lovely, humble human with an internal compass geared towards doing what he can with the capabilities he has been given. Having established that I am far from intimidating as an interviewer, we settled into a free-flowing conversation pivoted around the notion of what it means to be (in Alvaro's words) an 'Average Joe' pushing themselves outside their comfort zone in order to help and inspire others. We reflected on why, for Alvaro, competition will always be about the people you meet, not the podiums you top; the extraordinary that can be found in the everyday; the importance of telling stories; what we can learn from a 'bike-view' of the world; why finding balance is harder than training; what honesty means; being accountable to ourselves; Mama Maria's secret recipe, and what we can all learn from 'simmering' our soup in life.
Follow: @sir_cyclealot
Watch: Cycling 4 Soup
Give: www.ellas.org.uk
www.tribefreedomfoundation.com
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