From premiering his film and riding across China in late 2025, to writing a new chapter that combines endurance sport with pure adventure.
Luke Grenfell-Shaw
The last time I spoke to Luke Grenfell-Shaw was six years and a few months after a bewildering and devastating confluence of events. In a matter of weeks, Luke had hurried home to the UK from Siberia under an ominous cloud, he was then diagnosed with stage IV cancer, and in the midst of the chemotherapy that followed swiftly after, his only brother John died running trails in the Lake District.
Luke wasn’t meant to live. He wasn’t meant to survive the summer of 2018. But the hours gave way to days, then weeks, and months. He made it through chemo, through surgery and radiation, and a master’s degree at Oxford University. And all the while he was plotting how best to spend what days he had left. The memory of his brother and a natural curiosity about the world conspired in his imagination, and ‘Bristol2Beijing’ was conceived as a way to honour both.
And again, he wasn’t supposed to make it. But he did – as far as the Covid-19 pandemic would allow him – and by the time we spoke at the end of 2024, Luke was taking his first steps into a deeper future than he’d been able or allowed himself to consider in six years.
Six years after being diagnosed with incurable cancer, Luke Grenfell-Shaw is re-writing the ‘laws of life’
Since being diagnosed with stage IV cancer at 24, Luke has completed a Master’s at Oxford, cycled from Bristol to Beijing on a tandem and represented GB as a trail runner.
15 months after that first conversation, my call found Luke on Gran Canaria where he was in the midst of a very windy training camp with some fellow trail-running athletes. In the interim, he’d celebrated another birthday, gained a sponsorship from running brand Brooks, completed a tour of cinemas and festivals with ‘A Life in Tandem’ – the documentary film that told his story – and finally embarked on the last leg of his ride to Beijing which had been impassable on his original attempt.
Less than 24 hours before we spoke, Luke’s film had premiered on YouTube, where it has lived ever since for all the world to see.
“It actually felt like an incredibly positive and joyous evening,” Luke told Escape Collective of the previous night’s live premiere and virtual Q&A. “Up until the moment it started I was really worried that there’d be a technical glitch, but then it started and I just relaxed. Obviously, it’s a very personal story, it’s particularly personal to me, but really unexpectedly I was crying when I was watching it, especially the bit about John, because it brought it back so powerfully for me.
“It does seem like a film that for some people is really quite impactful and I think it’s really exciting that it is now out out in the world. But on another side, large parts of the past year were all towards organising the premiere and then the film tour, and trying to get a distributor. That was ultimately unsuccessful, but it’s perhaps for the best that it’s going to be on a more accessible platform. I think the point I came to is that I need to be moving on with other stuff in my life.”
Luke and director Mike during their film tour with ‘A Life in Tandem’.
Luke is a young man whose childhood and young adult life was more adventurous than most, from hiking holidays with family to ultra-marathons in the Ural Mountains, so it’s not surprising to hear some of the references that he brought with him into the project with director Mike Rumsey. But he couldn’t help that something more sinister loomed over his story.
“I think I wasn’t expecting to be this proud of the film, and that it’s something I can put my name to, aside from the fact it happens to be about me,” Luke said. “But it’s certainly not the film that I imagined I was going to create. I think it’s been one of the struggles that I’ve had, that in some ways the story that I’ve always wanted to tell is something like ’14 Peaks’, ‘Free Solo’, ‘Dawn Wall’. It’s maybe because I’ve got a different perspective, right? For me, there were life and death moments of the brakes failing on the Kyrgyzstan Pass; or descending in a tunnel in Turkey and a car overtakes us, skids, loses control, goes up the side of the tunnel, does a full loop-the-loop and lands on its roof in front of us, and we narrowly avoided that…
“There were quite a few high octane moments but none of them were captured on camera, or well enough to make the final cut. So I’ve had to make peace with the fact we’ve made a very different film, and it isn’t one that is as easy to sell.”
This last comment may seem surprising given the adversity and jeopardy that is threaded through the story, and the popularity of such themes in documentary films and beyond, but Luke’s perspective is very different. Indeed, in preparing the film for its release on YouTube, he was reluctant to give ‘cancer’ too much attention or focus at all.
“People were telling me, ‘You need to put cancer in there,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t want to put cancer in there, it’s not about cancer’, but everyone was saying it had to be, ‘that’s going to make us want to watch it, that’s interesting.’ So I’ve got this very different perspective where I’ve kind of had enough of talking about this narrative. And whilst I should be clear that at the start of [Bristol2Beijing] I was really happy to and I still choose to talk about it, the emphasis has massively shifted and I’m like, who wants to hear something about cancer?”
It was partly that tension that prompted Luke’s most recent cycling trip. Anyone who’s seen ‘A Life in Tandem’ or read Luke’s story will know that the last leg across China was completed virtually back home in the UK as a result of the lingering pandemic. But as time wore on, Luke was feeling the ever-stronger pull of adventure, and this time, that’s all he was after: pure and simple adventure.
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