The First Small Steps

The first step towards a marathon was not running.

That sounds obvious now, but it mattered at the time. The word “marathon” was sitting there like a dare, huge and faintly ridiculous, and there was no version of me in January 2012 that could simply leap from 142.6kg and a desk-bound life into marathon training. If I tried to hold the whole thing in my head at once, I could almost feel my brain looking for an exit.

So the first step was much smaller.

I got out of bed and took the dog for a walk.

Getting Out Of Bed

Marble was the immediate winner in all of this. She was a greyhound pup, and suddenly her human had developed a strange new enthusiasm for going outside before the rest of the house had properly joined the day. At about 5am on 23 January, before the official start of anything, I woke up in a warm bed and had the first little argument with myself.

One half of my brain said, get up.

The other half said, don’t be ridiculous.

That was the whole contest at the beginning. Not courage. Not athleticism. Not some stirring montage of a future runner. Just whether I could put my feet on the floor before the old voice talked me out of it.

I did.

Then I walked Marble for about fifteen minutes around the local area. That was it. No running. No heroics. No expensive kit. No dramatic evidence that a marathon runner had been born. If anything, it was almost comically ordinary, which was precisely why it worked. I did not need to become the person who could run 42.2 kilometres. I only needed to become the person who got out of bed and walked the dog.

That difference was everything.

Making The Day Visible

The next few days became a kind of experiment in making change small enough to survive contact with real life. I walked the dog in the morning. I took a ten-minute walk at lunchtime. I got off the bus one stop early. I walked down the stairs from Level 8 instead of using the lift. I took a longer route to the busport. I drank water, which sounds simple unless you were me and had spent years treating water like the least interesting liquid on the planet.

I also started writing it all down.

The diary was awkward, but it did something important straight away. It made the day visible. Breakfast was no longer a blur. Lunch was no longer a vague impression. The cupcake at work, the small piece of cherry pie, the chicken and salad sandwich, the extra glass of water: once it went on the page, it existed. I could not pretend the better choices did not matter, and I could not pretend the wobbly choices had not happened.

That could have turned miserable very quickly. I have never been helped much by guilt. Guilt tends to make one bad decision feel like permission to abandon the whole thing. What surprised me in that first week was that the diary gave me a bit of honesty without making every imperfection a moral drama.

On 24 January I ate one cupcake and one small piece of cherry pie at work. Previously, I probably would have had a few more across the day. That was not perfect eating, but it was a change. The next day there were more cupcakes and leftover cherry pie, because of course there were. Temptation did not politely wait for me to build a full set of healthy habits. Still, I took the thinnest piece, skipped the biggest piece, and eventually said no when seconds were offered.

Tiny victory. Still a victory.

The pedometer helped more than I expected. At first I was not entirely convinced that a step counter belonged in the story, but then I started to see the numbers build up across a normal day. The morning dog-walk route was about 1.77 kilometres. On 25 January it took 18 minutes and 50 seconds. A day later it was 17 minutes and 25 seconds. By 31 January it was down to 16 minutes and 01 second.

That did not make me fit, not yet. But it gave me evidence.

Evidence is powerful when you are trying to outrun your own excuses. I could say I was changing, or I could look at the little plastic gadget and see that I had walked 6,907 steps by the evening of 25 January. On Australia Day I recorded 12,574 steps. On 31 January I was over 10,500 again. Suddenly ordinary choices had weight: one stop early, stairs instead of lift, a walk at lunchtime, a different route across Perth.

One of the funny things about Hearts Across Australia, looking back from this distance, is that the later story became full of enormous numbers. Fifty-kilometre days. Hundreds of kilometres. Weeks of getting up and doing it again. But the habit underneath all of that was already forming here, in miniature. Do the next measurable thing. Make it visible. Tell the truth about it. Repeat.

The Body Reports Back

The body started reporting back almost immediately.

On Australia Day I walked, cleaned up the backyard and pool area, went to the City of Gosnells breakfast, went to the fireworks, played in the pool with Kian, and managed not to turn the day into the usual food-and-drink free-for-all. I still ate proper Australia Day food. I still had a couple of beers. I still had dessert at a family dinner that weekend. Life did not become an endless cycle of salad and water, thank goodness.

But I did not pig out.

That was new.

So was waking up the next morning without feeling wrecked. A couple of weeks earlier, a day like that would probably have left me with a sore back, sore knees, general aches, a bloated stomach, and a vague sense that my body was annoyed at me for existing. Instead I got up early again, with enthusiasm, and took Marble out.

There were still ridiculous little realities to deal with. The first “sports injury” was not noble. It was inner-thigh chafing after a humid walk, solved with the heroic medical intervention of baby talc. Elite athlete stuff, clearly.

The water thing was stranger. I had a long-standing non-relationship with water. Tea, coffee, fizzy drinks, cordial, beer, wine, spirits, milk, hot chocolate: all excellent. Water: boring, occasionally funny-tasting, and generally something I bought alongside coffee because it seemed sensible.

Britt told me my body would start wanting it.

I laughed.

Then, within days, I started reaching for it. Not perfectly, and not because I had become some purified health machine. I still used cordial at times because plain water did not always thrill me. But the shift was real. I was drinking two or three litres a day, then more. I was not getting the same desperate thirst. I had started noticing the difference between being barely hydrated and actually giving my body something it had needed for years.

Food was harder. Not just eating less, but eating properly. Lunch in Perth became weirdly complicated. The old choices were easy: curry, Chinese, roast pork, a burger, something fast and satisfying. The new choices involved standing in front of salad bars and sandwich places trying to assemble a sensible meal without spending a fortune or half the lunch break. Healthy food often felt less like a simple option and more like an exam I had not studied for.

That was part of the education too. I was not just changing the amount of food. I was learning what fuel meant. Britt had already pushed back on the idea that eating too little was automatically good. I needed enough food, the right kind of food, and enough awareness to stop turning every meal into either punishment or indulgence.

Why Walking Counted

By the end of that first week, I had learned something I would keep relearning in bigger and stranger forms later: the huge thing is rarely done by staring at the huge thing.

The huge thing is done by choosing one action that belongs to it.

For me, the first action had not even been exercise. It was sending an email to Britt and making the thought real enough that someone else could answer it. After that came the walk with Marble. Then the diary. Then water. Then one bus stop. Then stairs. Then a pedometer. Then the first signs that my body was not as hopeless as I had assumed, and my mind was not as fixed as I had feared.

That is why this part matters to the later crossing.

Before I could walk across Australia, I had to learn that walking counted.

Not as a metaphor. Literally. Feet on pavement. Dog at the door. A stopwatch running. A number on a cheap little device. A decision made while the bed was still warm and the old excuses were still trying to sound reasonable.

It did not look like transformation yet.

It looked like a bloke walking his dog in the dark, trying to become the sort of person who did what he said he was going to do.