Running For Those Who Can't

I woke up with race-day feeling.

That was ridiculous, because it was not race day. There was no medal waiting at the end, no timing mat, no official start gun, no nervous shuffle in a crowd of strangers while everyone pretended not to care about the portaloos.

It was just a Sunday long run.

But at stupid o’clock on 8 September 2013 I was awake, fed, packed, and weirdly excited. I had a bag ready, gels and sports drink sorted, and a 16 km run ahead of me around the Swan River. Part of the route would sit on the Perth Marathon course, which already gave the morning a little charge. That course was no longer just a map of pain and six hours forty-seven minutes. It was proof. It was the place where something in me had survived long enough to become real.

The real reason I was buzzing, though, came after the run.

I was going to meet the Rogues.

As a confirmed lone wolf, that was not nothing.

A Club You Joined By Saying Yes

I had found Rogue Runners Club Australia in the weeks after the marathon, when running was still expanding faster than I could explain it.

At first, I loved the lack of fuss. You did not need to pass a test, wear the right expression, run a particular pace, know the handshake, or present evidence that you had been personally approved by the committee of proper runners. You said you were in. You ran. You helped point people toward the cause.

That appealed to me enormously.

I was still new enough to running to remember feeling like an intruder. Even after the marathon, part of me still looked around at events and wondered if someone was going to notice I had snuck in through a side door. The Rogues cut straight through that nonsense. It was informal, almost suspiciously easy, and somehow that made it more serious to me, not less.

The first time I wrote about it, I was already imagining the thing spreading. Thousands of people calling themselves Rogues. Runners all over Australia doing their events, telling people about the cause, taking the thing that running had given them and passing some of it on.

No paperwork. No empire. No grand machine.

Just people deciding to be part of something.

That was exactly the sort of idea my post-marathon brain was vulnerable to.

More Than My Own Finish Line

Only a few hours after first talking publicly about joining the Rogues, I wrote a blog post asking what it was all really about.

The question was not small. I was restless, frightened by ordinary life, allergic to the idea of simply settling into a safe, sensible, dreary existence and calling that enough. Running had woken me up. That was the phrase I used then, and it was not an exaggeration. I had become fitter and healthier, yes, but the deeper change was that I had started wanting more from being alive.

That was the bit that mattered.

Running changed lives in three ways, as I understood it then. It changed the person doing it. It raised money for causes. It gave other people examples and inspiration.

The Rogues sat right in the middle of that.

Until then, so much of my running had been about personal evidence. Could I run 10 km? Could I finish a half marathon? Could I finish a marathon? Could I come back after the emotional hangover and keep moving? Could I set a time goal and risk missing it in public?

All of that still mattered. It still matters now. You do not get to the bigger story without the smaller proofs.

But Rogue gave the running a direction beyond my own finish line. It took the same stubbornness, the same sweat, the same silly early mornings, and attached them to people who would run if they could.

That is a very different feeling.

The First Rogue Race

My first event after saying I would run as a Rogue was the Perth City to Surf 12 km.

I had entered through Jetts Canning Vale South, so it was not a Rogue entry in any formal sense. I was not carrying a giant banner or wearing anything that announced the cause. But in my head the shift had happened. I had said yes. I was running as part of something.

City to Surf was enormous compared with anything I had done before. About 30,000 people in the 12 km event, a delayed start, a long walk to the start line, and then hills. So many hills. My running life to that point had mostly been flat paths, flat river stretches, flat excuses to avoid doing hill work. The big hill in the Perth Marathon had left a mark on me, so this course felt like a personal attack delivered by town planning.

The plan was simple enough: start carefully, take the climbs with respect, recover over the top, use the downhills without destroying my legs, and aim for around 84 minutes.

For a person who used to avoid planning with almost religious commitment, I had become disturbingly interested in strategy.

The event went well. Better than well. I finished inside the target, with the official image showing 1:23:38 and my race report calling it 1:23:50 on the watch. I had taken on a hilly 12 km course, kept my head, and proved that the training was working.

That was the personal win.

The Rogue part was quieter. It was the knowledge that the effort had another layer to it. That I could be proud of the result and still understand that the morning was not only mine.

I was learning that both things could be true at once.

Believe In Blaise

The Rogues were running for Believe in Blaise.

At first, Blaise was a name attached to a cause. A little boy on the other side of the country. A reason to ask people for donations. A story I cared about, but from a distance.

Then the details began to land.

On 27 August I tried to explain it to the minions in the most no more mr fat guy way possible: calling all Aussie runners of any level. The people just starting out, the slow waddlers like me, the fast ones up the front, anyone who knew that running had the power to create change. Declare yourself Rogue, promote the link, and if you needed the emotional nudge, look at Blaise. While we could run, he had just reached the milestone of going to bed on his own.

That got me.

It still does.

There is a particular kind of perspective that arrives when your own suffering is voluntary. My long runs hurt, but I chose them. My races frightened me, but I entered them. My training schedule asked things of me, but I could ignore it if I wanted to. Even the marathon, for all the darkness it dragged me through, was a thing I had chosen.

Running for someone who did not have that choice made the gift of it harder to take for granted.

Not in a guilty way. Guilt is a rubbish fuel source. It burns dirty and makes you weird.

This was more useful than guilt. It was gratitude with somewhere to go.

I could run. So I should not make the fact that I could run small.

South Perth, Breakfast, And A Two-Hotplate Future

The South Perth meet-up had been on my September list for a while.

Finish the half-marathon training. Meet other Rogues on 8 September. Keep building toward Fremantle Half in October. Keep saying yes to the strange little doors that kept opening.

That morning I ran 16 km around the beautiful Swan River at an average pace of 6:59 per kilometre. I spotted some fellow Rogues along the way, which made the solo run feel less solo without changing the thing I liked about running alone. Then the running part ended and everyone gathered for breakfast.

This was my first proper running group event.

I know that sounds small now. Later, running groups, parkrun crowds, event mornings, charity shirts, and supporters would become a normal part of my life. But in September 2013, walking into that gathering still mattered. I had spent so much of my running life inside my own head, with my own watch, my own playlist before I stopped using music, my own doubts, my own private negotiations. I was used to reporting back to people online. I was less used to physically standing there with them.

And it was brilliant.

Renee was promoted to Chief Minion, which felt exactly like the kind of nonsense title a morning like that deserved. There was a short video of the Rogues. There was enough shared energy that I went home tired from the run, the sun, and the fun, which is a very specific and excellent kind of tired.

But the most important conversation was with Shinno.

Pete Shinnick was one of the brains behind the Rogues, and after spending that morning with him I understood the thing better. It was not just a social running club, though it absolutely was that. It had a barely-there structure that made it easy for people to join in, but it also had a heart. It wanted to use running to do good.

That combination mattered.

Make it easy to belong.

Make it mean something.

By that evening I was writing about Rogue chapters across Australia, national meet-ups, and whether a two-hotplate barbie would cope if the thing grew. I was half joking, as usual, but only half. The idea of runners gathering all over the country, connected by the simple fact that they loved running and wanted to run for those who could not, made immediate sense to me.

It felt like a second family already.

The Life Around The Running

It is tempting, looking back, to treat those weeks as a tidy stepping stone toward Hearts Across Australia.

They were not tidy.

They were full of ordinary chaos: training plans, event temptation, house stuff, study, work, parenting, naps, push-up challenges, abs, cold symptoms, too many ideas, too much Facebook, and a lot of me trying to work out what had happened to my life.

At the same time, the writing was getting sharper about change.

I was writing about bright people, dull people, frustrated people, and the choice not to let the dull win. I was answering messages from people who wanted to sort themselves out but did not know where to start, and I found myself explaining the first steps: see a doctor, drink water, walk daily, start paying attention to food. I was writing about how personal change can leave you living inside a life built by an older version of yourself, and how uncomfortable that can be.

That was not abstract content. That was my actual problem.

The running had changed me faster than the rest of my life knew how to accommodate. My priorities had shifted. My language had shifted. My sense of what counted as a good day had shifted. A run, a post about running, a message from another runner, a story from someone making a change - these had become the things that made me feel switched on.

Rogue fitted into that because it gave the change a social shape.

The marathon had proved something inside me.

The page had turned that proof into a community.

The Rogues showed me that a community could carry a cause.

I did not have the Hearts Across Australia idea yet, not properly. I had no route, no Heart Foundation agreement, no campervan drama, no plan to leave Canning River parkrun and cross the country on foot. But pieces were collecting around me. Running. Story. Cause. Community. Big Australian distances. Brisbane names starting to matter. People who would encourage a ridiculous idea instead of politely smothering it.

You can see the shape beginning, even if I could not.

I Am A Rogue

The clearest version came a little over a week later.

On 17 September, I wrote that there was something people should know about no more mr fat guy, and that this one was unusually serious.

I was a Rogue.

That meant I did not only run for myself. I ran for those who would, but could not.

There it was. The sentence that named the shift.

Not because my own running stopped mattering. It mattered enormously. I was still chasing a sub-60 10 km, still building toward the Fremantle Half, still learning how to pace, fuel, recover, and stop being a plodder with no regard for detail. The day before that serious Rogue post, I had written about the lessons learned from a 10 km personal best and realised something important: I set goals, planned strategy, dug under the surface.

I was a runner.

The Rogue sentence did not erase that. It enlarged it.

I could be a runner for myself and still run with other people in mind. I could chase my own numbers and still remember that the ability to chase them was not guaranteed. I could let running change my life and still use it, however imperfectly, to help change someone else’s.

That is where Believe in Blaise became more than a charity link.

The next day, the sh*t-sorter file featured Graham Whittaker, a Queensland-based ex-pat Pom who was about to run the Surf Coast Century for Blaise. Graham was fast in ways I could barely comprehend. A sub-3 marathoner. Trail runner. Ultra runner. The sort of runner who says 100 km and somehow means it as a plan rather than a medical emergency.

But the part that stayed with me was Blaise.

Four years old. Ipswich. Spastic Quadraplegic Cerebral Palsy. Treatment in the United States helping but expensive. A family trying to give their child what he needed.

The cause had a face now. A family. A place. A boy only a little older than my own son.

On 21 September, when Graham finished 100 km in under 12 hours, I reposted a photo and called him Minion of the Week. That was my silly language, but the admiration underneath it was sincere. Graham had taken his ability to run an absurd distance and turned it outward.

That mattered to me more than I could have explained at the time.

The Bit That Carried Forward

The Rogue chapter belongs in this story because Hearts Across Australia did not appear out of nowhere.

It came from a series of permissions.

The first run gave me permission to try.

The half marathon gave me permission to think bigger.

The marathon gave me permission to believe that impossible-looking things might actually yield if you trained, suffered, adapted, and kept moving.

The no more mr fat guy community gave me permission to tell the truth in public and find people who understood.

The Rogues gave me permission to attach my running to other people.

That last piece mattered. Without it, the crossing might have stayed a private adventure fantasy. With it, distance started to look like something that could gather people, stories, generosity, and ridiculous encouragement around it.

I did not know yet that Shinno would later post a joke training route that would make something in my head click.

I did not know that Brisbane and Ipswich would become loaded words.

I did not know that Blaise’s story would still be echoing at the far end of the continent years later.

I only knew that I had woken up early on a Sunday, run 16 km around the river, eaten breakfast with people who felt like they might become my kind of people, and gone home with a bigger understanding of what running could be.

It could change me.

It could connect me.

And if I was lucky, if I was willing, if I stopped making it smaller than it was, it could be used for someone else too.

Images From The Day