Five years ago, a road accident on a scooter left Talia Lazarus re-learning how to walk. What followed was a half marathon, a podcast built from scratch, and a new career she never planned for all of it, she says, born from choosing to get back up.
August 2021
The Day Everything Changed
Talia Lazarus was 25, coming down a hill on an electric scooter, when it happened. “There was a bus, a gap and the pavement, and someone else cycled through that gap which made me think I’ll get through just fine,” she remembers. “I got to the gap and to be honest I am not entirely sure what happened next.”
The scooter picked up speed. She lost control, veered into the pavement, and was thrown into the side of a bus. “I still remember the thud.” Two strangers pulled her to the side of the road. “I was all on my own. And as they held me at the side of the road, my left leg out in the road, I was screaming, I was in shock.” One passer-by called an ambulance; another messaged her friends and family from her phone.
“I knew someone was wrong with my left leg your body can feel these things. And I was 25, and I knew this was about to be one hell of a really long, hard journey.”
When paramedics arrived, they told her nothing appeared broken and asked if she could walk to the ambulance. She could not. “I put both my arms around the paramedics, took one step through my left leg, and my ankle went one direction and my knee the other, like cooked spaghetti. My leg buckled under my bodyweight.”
A friend reached the ambulance in time and rode with her to hospital. Wheeled in on a stretcher, she turned to him and said the words that would come to define the next five years: “Everything happens for a reason.” He asked her to explain the reason. “I don’t know yet,” she said, “but I am going to figure it out.”
She had torn her ACL, MCL and meniscus in her left leg. “It was the day my life changed course.”
“I burnt my entire life to the ground. When I look back I didn’t realise I was subconsciously doing it. I rose from the flames and ashes like the phoenix, and that’s exactly how I look at my life.”
The Middle
Between the Accident and the Milestones
Recovery came in two surgeries. Between them, in rehab, Talia told her physio she felt “like an animal being fed to slaughter” training her legs strong only to have them cut open again for ACL reconstruction. He explained the logic: the stronger she went into the second surgery, the stronger she’d come out the other side.
The reconstruction happened in February 2022. Later that year, while she was still doing 30-second interval sprints on a treadmill in rehab, someone put an idea to her, the London Landmarks Half Marathon. “I wanted to show myself I could technically ‘break my legs’ and then run a half marathon.” She asked her physio if she could do it in four months. He said yes. She ran it for Breast Cancer Now — just over a year after her surgery.
“The whole in-between was a lot of 25/26-year-old me figuring things out. I became a machine in the gym. I started my podcast, I picked up part-time jobs, and I just kept going.” The sports presenting career, she’s quick to point out, came later after the marathon, not before.
“It makes me think: when we’re teenagers, early twenties, we feel like we have to have everything figured out our careers, where we want to go. And there I was at 25, having an accident. I burnt my entire life to the ground. I didn’t realise I was subconsciously doing it. I rose from the flames and ashes like the phoenix, and that’s exactly how I look at my life.”
Why a Podcast
Built From the Flames
Before the accident, Talia had an office job in events and exhibitions, and a first-class degree in Marketing and Advertising. During the two weeks off work after her first knee surgery, she started writing about the things she loved but could no longer do rock climbing (she was a qualified instructor in her early twenties), the outdoors, mountains, travel. “So on the Sunday night before I was meant to go back to work, I quit my full-time job to be a ‘travel journalist.’ I am not a travel journalist. But I’d never quit a job before without another lined up, and I guess I just went with it and followed a feeling inside.”
She began talking to friends about their own journeys and writing up their stories on a blog she called I Got Back Up. “I noticed how thankful my friends were for the platform, and how readers would say, ‘if this person can go through this and achieve that after, it motivates me.'” Around the same time, between her two surgeries, she was transcribing interviews for the blog until, listening back to one, she realised how much more emotion lived in the voice than on the page. “I sat there thinking, ‘am I about to start a podcast?'”
She taught herself the rest. “If even one episode, one person, one story from my show can change someone else’s life somewhere in the world give them that tiny glimmer of light and hope then that’s my job done. We all feel very alone a lot of the time in this world, especially when we’re going through something, and I want people to know, feel and see that they are never alone.”
The name has never needed updating. “You fall down seven times, get back up eight. It’s how do we get back up from what life throws at us, how do we get back up every day, how can we use things to fuel us, change us. How do we get back up, and why do we choose to.”
“You fall down seven times, get back up eight.”
Talia Lazarus
Ninety Conversations
What the Guests Have Taught Her
Across more than 90 episodes, Talia has spoken with guests navigating Parkinson’s, cancer, Multiple Sclerosis, and everything in between. “Every conversation changes me. Whether a guest thinks differently to me or more similarly, they’ve all opened my eyes, made me rethink things perspectives, mindsets and shown me the huge strength we all hold and harbour inside of us. I don’t think a lot of people even know their own strength. I was one of them. But we all have it inside us.”
One episode in particular changed the course of her career. Editing back a conversation about how you never know what a day might bring “you could hit a bus, I did” she realised she’d been putting off a pitch email to Arsenal Fan TV. “I stopped editing the show, wrote the email, sent it, and got on with my day.” She went to an Arsenal Champions League game at the Emirates that night. Got a reply from AFTV the next day. Her first presenting broadcast job followed three days later.
“I think it’s helped my own process and journey,” she says of hosting. “I’ve had deep, vulnerable, open conversations with over 90 people where we share together. We laugh, we cry, we listen. I’ve met some of the most powerful and amazing people, and I thank every single one of them for helping me on my own journey.”
Five Years On
What She’d Tell Herself
This August marks five years since the accident. “I’m still figuring it out. I’ve got an idea — so we will wait and see.” What she does know is what she’d say to the version of herself re-learning to walk: “Just keep going, Talia. You are a lot stronger and braver than you realise. I believe my accident happened for me, not to me. I was meant to have my accident, and now I have the opportunity to create the life of my dreams. It’s not going to be easy, it’s going to be really hard, it’ll be dark at times but you don’t see the stars in the sky without the darkness behind it.”
“At 25 it was as though my life and world was falling apart, and now at 30 I feel like I am only at the beginning — and that excites me incredibly.”
“Maybe the journey isn’t about becoming anything,” she reflects. “Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so that you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.” As for “recovered” it was never a finish line. “It’s a journey. I swim, I box, I play tennis, padel give me a sport and I’ll try it. I’ve run a half marathon, I climb and hike mountains. But it’s also a new me.”
What’s Next
Building It From the Ashes
Ask what’s next and Talia is candid: she doesn’t fully know yet, and that’s the point. “I’m very excited to see where my journey takes me.” (She’ll also admit to being “very excited for the new Premier League season to start after watching Arsenal lift the trophy.”) For I Got Back Up itself, the ambition is bigger. “My podcast is my baby. It’s built from the flames, ashes and darkness of my own journey, and I want to continue to grow it, build it, explore with it, travel with it, and change the world with it with every opportunity that comes with it.”
The Voyage Edit
A Few Quicker Questions
QHow do you spend a day off?
“Probably in the gym, the swimming pool, with friends and family, listening to music I love music. A day off can also be spent going to Ibiza for the day to see Swedish House Mafia, or climbing Mount Snowdon.”
QA person, book, or piece of advice that’s shaped your recovery?
“There hasn’t been just one it’s everyone from my journey, every book, every person I’ve had on my show. It’s also the small things: becoming open to advice, mindsets and perspectives that come from films, music, quick conversations with strangers. There’s so much beauty in that.”
QWhat do people misunderstand about resilience?
“That it doesn’t have to be every day. You don’t have to be strong and have it all together every day you can’t, we’re human. If you felt on top of the world one day and at the bottom the next, that’s okay. Life isn’t linear, but don’t let life defeat you.”
QOne guest, living or not, you’d love on the show?
“Axwell, Sebastian Ingrosso and Steve Angello from Swedish House Mafia. ‘Tell ’em how you backflip through tragic, show ’em how the struggle made magic’ a phrase that resonates with my entire soul. A phrase that is me.”
“Tell ’em how you backflip through tragic, show ’em how the struggle made magic.”
Swedish House Mafia, quoted by Talia Lazarus
