Where The Heart Belonged

People kept asking whether I was doing it for charity.

That was not where the Perth-to-Brisbane idea had started. At the beginning, the idea was messier than that. It was about proving something, first to myself and then to anyone who needed the nudge: ordinary people could change, ridiculous goals could become practical work, and the story of no more mr fat guy did not have to stop at me getting a marathon medal and a few nicer shirts.

But I understood the question.

If someone says they want to cross Australia on foot, most people reach for the nearest available explanation. Charity made the idea legible. It gave the madness a social container. It turned “why would you do that?” into “who are you doing it for?”

The more I sat with it, the more obvious the answer became.

The Statistic I Nearly Became

The Heart Foundation was not a branding decision. It was uncomfortably personal.

I had spent years behaving like my body was somebody else’s problem. Too heavy, too tired, too many cigarettes, too much food, too much drink, too much avoidance dressed up as humour. I could be funny about it in public because being the life and soul of the party was easier than admitting how unhappy I was underneath.

The frightening part is that even Dad’s heart scare had not properly woken me up. He had found out he had scarring from an old, undiscovered heart attack. That should have shaken me into immediate change. It did not. I still had that stupid little belief that consequences were for other people.

Grandpa had died of a heart attack when I was eight. That loss sat in the family story long before I had language for my own risk. By 2013, with the weight gone and the running becoming a bigger part of my life, I could finally see the shape of what I had been moving away from. I had been a strong candidate to become another heart attack statistic.

So when I contacted the Heart Foundation, it was not because I needed a logo to put beside the big idea. It was because their work met the truth of my own before-and-after.

I had changed my life in a way that might have saved it.

That felt worth carrying across the country.

Subiaco

The meeting at the Heart Foundation offices in Subiaco was one of those early moments where the idea stopped being just me talking loudly on the internet.

I went in with the Perth-to-Brisbane plan still full of gaps. I had a story, a rough route, far too much enthusiasm, and not nearly enough detail. But I also had alignment. My own changes, the heart-risk thread, the public message, and the charity’s mission all belonged in the same room.

I came away with support, advice, and permission to make the Heart Foundation the official charity. I became a Heart Hero, which sounded more glamorous than the reality of me still trying to work out how on earth to move a human body from Perth to Brisbane in one piece.

That charity connection gave HAA another layer of responsibility. It was no longer enough to be a good story. It had to do good as well.

I still wanted the message to be broader than fundraising. I did not want Hearts Across Australia to become a long donation tin with shoes on. The point was still change, belief, health, community, and what becomes possible when people stop waiting to feel ready.

But the Heart Foundation gave the message somewhere to land.

London

Then London appeared.

That still feels slightly absurd. I had only recently put the London Marathon on my wish list. I was born in the UK and had grown up watching it on television, the way you watch those huge events that seem to belong to other people’s lives. Somewhere under all the practical Australian adulthood, there was still a kid in me who saw London as the marathon.

During the Heart Foundation conversation, Wendy Mathews mentioned they had charity places for London in 2014 and asked whether I would be interested.

I did not need asking twice.

Of course, saying yes meant fundraising. It meant training for another marathon while trying to build the foundations for Perth to Brisbane. It meant getting from a Perth meeting room to one of the most famous start lines in the world in a matter of months. It meant trying to raise serious money, arrange travel, keep running, keep writing, keep believing.

But the emotional centre of it was simpler than that.

I remember the thought sharpening one morning: London was for Grandpa.

Not only for him, and not in a neat movie-scene way. It was still a bucket-list race. It was still an adventure. It was still me, being me, saying yes too quickly and then working out how to survive the yes. But it also carried the heart story back to where part of my family story began. A boy who had grown up watching the London Marathon on television was now going to run it for the Heart Foundation, with Grandpa in the background of every reason why that mattered.

From where I had been in 2012, that was ridiculous.

My second marathon was going to be London.

A Bigger Why

This was the point where HAA began to gather layers.

The original click had been wild and personal: Perth to Brisbane, running changes lives, prove anything is possible. The Heart Foundation gave it a cause. London gave it a bridge back to childhood, family, grief, and health. The fundraising gave it a practical responsibility. The public story gave other people a way to step in and help.

I was still making a lot of it up.

That is not false modesty. I genuinely did not know how to build something like this. I knew how to show up to training. I knew how to tell the truth online. I knew how to get excited and then do the work after the excitement had worn off. But HAA was bigger than any skill set I had.

That meant the reason had to be strong enough to carry all the incompetence while I learned.

The Heart Foundation connection did that. It gave the big, messy, hopeful no more mr fat guy message a public heart.

And in a way, that was exactly what I needed.

I had spent so long trying not to become a statistic. Now I had the chance to walk and run across Australia telling people they did not have to become one either.

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