She was the first woman to kayak the Amazon river solo and she has walked a tightrope across Battersea Power Station and completed a 78-mile ultra-marathon.
Then, four years ago, TV presenter Helen Skelton became a mum and thought her days as an action woman were behind her.
As she settled into the very different challenge of looking after sons Ernie, four, and Louis, three, the Countryfile presenter and former Blue Peter star, 36, admits she stopped thinking of herself as a “badass”.
But fans of Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins have seen Helen remains full of courage, determination and endurance.
Her quiet composure helped her beat six other celebs to make it to the final with soap star Nikki Sanderson, ex-boxer Tony Bellew, Paralympian Lauren Steadman, TOWIE’s Joey Essex and Rudimental DJ Locksmith.
“Well, ‘just getting on with it’ is what women do, isn’t it?” she smiles.
“I think before you have kids, you can do what you want, go where you want. Now I have two kids, I’m in a different phase of my life.
“Everything I do is based around the boys and that’s how it should be... and it’s how I like it.
“But this was a chance for me to be like, OK, Mummy’s badass!
“Nobody wants to go to work and leave the kids but at least if I had to do it then it was for something cool.”
Helen’s courage on the Channel 4 show has earned her respect from her whole family.
She says: “I’ve shown [my kids] little bits of the show and they do love it. My little boy, ages ago, saw a girl on a rollercoaster and he said, ‘She’s brave like you, Mummy’.
“And that’s the best thing that anyone could ever say to me. He knows what he’s doing, though – he’s got me wrapped around his little finger.”
Hubby Richie Myler, 30, a Leeds Rhinos rugby league star, was blown away too. Helen says: “Richie is humble. But you only see small parts of what goes on in the show and you don’t see context, so he knows more about how hard it was.
“And he did an interview and he said I was stronger than him, which totally blew my socks off. I was like, ‘What?!’ He’s never said that to me.”
Helen grew up on a dairy farm in Cumbria and lived in Perpignan, France, while Richie played for the Catalan Dragons, before joining the Rhinos.
In the show, she became emotional as she opened up about wanting to prove she was still good at doing adventurous things now she was a mother.
She told the show’s instructors, led by former SAS hardman Ant Middleton: “You have kids and everything changes and I guess before I had my kids I could do what I wanted and go where I wanted. I took on bits of challenges and made all kinds of programmes, and I just wanted to do this to see if I’ve still got that and can still do that.”
But despite being scared to talk about her feelings, Helen says she has been amazed by the support and solidarity that she has received.
She admits: “I’ve been so overwhelmed by the amount of people messaging me.
“Those kinds of shows are difficult for people like me – not because of the physical things but because of speaking about your emotional traumas.
"I’ve been really surprised by the amount of people who are in their 50s saying, ‘I feel exactly like that, I gave up my career to have kids and I don’t regret it but now I’m feeling a bit lost’. I was sort of embarrassed that I said it but now I’m glad because of the feedback.”
She adds: “Everyone wants to keep up appearances, don’t they? Nobody wants to whinge and say life is hard. It’s so good my generation is different from my mum’s, in that you can have kids and a career.
“But nobody wants to be the woman that admits or suggests that you can’t have it all, when so many people have done so much for us to be able to have it all.
"But when you’re a parent, you just can’t be in two places at once and that makes it difficult.”
But although it was the first time that Helen had properly been away from her sons, she learned she could use some of her parenting skills to make life easier during her SAS experience – with the show staff even dubbing her “mother hen”.
She says: “Going in, I wasn’t really sure where I fitted in. Am I a mum, am I a telly person, am I an adventurer? And I felt like I had quite a reputation to protect.
“But you evolve and grow and I realised you don’t have to stay in the same pigeon-hole that you might have been in during your 20s. I’m quite happy that I came out of that like ‘mother hen’.
The DS [directing staff] called me that like it was a bad thing but it’s not a bad thing to care about people.”
However, Helen was sometimes pushed to her limits during the gruelling challenges.
She says: “We were so nervous and anxious that people didn’t have time to use the toilet.
“So they just started peeing in a bucket in the corner and I was the only person to empty the bucket.
“And people started to poo in the bucket and I said, ‘Guys, I’m not here to be picking up your s***’.”
However, she adds with a giggle: “But, listen, when you’ve dealt with a million nappies in your time, dealing with Tony Bellew’s poo isn’t as bad.”
- Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins concludes tomorrow night at 9pm on Channel 4.
