This Is Actually Happening

For a long time, the crossing existed in two places at once.

In public, it was already a thing. I had said it out loud. I had told people I wanted to run and walk from Perth to Brisbane. I had contacted the Heart Foundation. I had run London. I had been to the Gold Coast. I had talked about routes, charity, belief, fundraising, sponsors, and all the big sparkly words that make a mad idea sound almost respectable if you say them with enough confidence.

Inside me, it was less tidy.

Some days I absolutely believed it. Other days I could feel the full absurdity of what I had done by making it public. There is a particular kind of fear that comes after you have told people your dream and they have not laughed enough to let you escape.

By July 2014, there was no escaping.

After Gold Coast

Gold Coast Marathon had given me another marker. Perth Marathon had proved I could become a marathoner. London had proved I could carry a bigger cause and a childhood dream onto a huge start line. Gold Coast, in its own way, pushed the Hearts Across Australia idea into the next version of itself.

I was in the right place to think big. The route now sounded less like Perth to Brisbane in the abstract and more like a 5400+ km line through actual places: Kalgoorlie, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, the Central Coast, Newcastle, the Gold Coast, Brisbane. The geography was becoming a list I could say out loud without immediately apologising.

I had also finally met Markus Forest in person.

Markus had come into the story after the original announcement, when people started sending advice, contacts, and variations of “you should talk to this person”. He was a Queensland ultra guy, and over the next 18 months he would become one of the voices helping me understand how a normal runner might train for something that was not normal at all.

That mattered because belief by itself was not going to move me across the country.

The whole weekend had that strange online-world-becoming-real-life feeling. I had lunch with running people I knew mostly through Facebook, went to the expo with them, compared medals, bumped into names I recognised, and had people come up to me because they knew no more mr fat guy. It was lovely, odd, and a little bit ridiculous. I was used to typing into the internet from Perth; on the Gold Coast, people were suddenly saying hello in person.

Gold Coast also gave the Run Down Under connection a real-world shape.

Run Down Under had been in the story since late 2013, because the alignment was obvious: a virtual run and walk around Australia sitting alongside my planned real crossing of Australia. By Gold Coast Marathon weekend it was not just a website, a singlet, and a club listing for no more mr fat guy. The day before the marathon, I went to a Run Down Under lunch and had one of those moments where the online world suddenly had faces.

Some people there already knew who I was, which was both lovely and a little bit strange. That lunch is where Jo and her family came into the wider HAA story, long before Jo became part of the Melbourne support network. It was also where I met Travis, the founder, properly in person. A year later, when I reached the Gold Coast during HAA, Travis would join me for a few kilometres. Another small connection from before the start line had quietly become part of the crossing.

Belief needed structure.

Belief needed distance in the legs.

Belief needed someone who could look at the mad thing and say, in effect, “right, then we had better make you harder to break.”

The Map Named Itself

The name came from a practical bit of fiddling.

By then, the Heart Foundation was already part of the story. That was why the hearts were there in the first place. I was at work, getting the new Facebook page ready, messing around with the Google Maps route so it would work as a cover image. The route itself was already absurd enough: Perth, Kalgoorlie, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, the Gold Coast, Brisbane. A line across the country, drawn on a screen, far easier to look at than to actually do.

I put red hearts over the map markers.

It was not a branding exercise. I was not sitting there trying to invent a neat project name. I was just making the map look right for the Heart Foundation connection.

Then I looked at it.

All those hearts across Australia.

That was the moment the penny dropped. Another switch in the brain. The kind of click where the thing has probably been sitting there in front of you for a while, but only becomes obvious once you accidentally see it from the right angle.

Hearts Across Australia.

It felt serendipitous, which is a polite way of saying I probably sat there for a second thinking, “well, obviously.”

Perth to Brisbane was still the route. The Heart Foundation was still the reason those little red shapes were on the map. But now the idea had a name, and once it had a name, it felt more real. Not finished. Not sensible. Definitely not safe. Just real enough to give it a page and start inviting other people into it.

The Page Wakes Up

Around the same time, the Hearts Across Australia Facebook page began to wake up properly.

The early public explanation was simple: I was planning to run from Perth to Brisbane in 2015, raising money for the Heart Foundation, with a planned start in May. I signed off as Gary, aka no more mr fat guy, because that was still the bridge people knew how to cross. HAA was the new thing, but no more mr fat guy was the story that explained why it existed.

Then the numbers started appearing in public.

Four months.

5400+ km.

One million dollars for the Heart Foundation.

Even now, I can feel how outrageous that all looks written down. It was outrageous then too. But there was a reason I kept pushing the size of it instead of making it sensible. The whole point was not that I was special enough to do something enormous. The whole point was that I was not special.

I had been an overweight, unhappy, unhealthy bloke who did not really know how to begin. I had made small changes, then bigger ones, then found myself standing in places I used to think belonged to other people.

If I could dare to dream of crossing Australia on foot, what did that say to someone else about the thing they were quietly scared to begin?

That was the question I wanted HAA to carry.

Six Hours

On 20 July 2014, during a six-hour morning walk, something shifted.

Not dramatically. No orchestra. No lightning bolt. Just the steady accumulation of time on feet, breathing, thinking, moving, and letting the scale of the idea settle into my body instead of only bouncing around my head.

Somewhere in that walk I realised: this is actually happening.

Not “this might happen if everything goes perfectly”.

Not “this would be a fun thing to talk about one day”.

Actually happening.

It would come together. People would help. I would learn what I needed to learn. The route would change. The plan would evolve. The fundraising would be hard. The logistics would be harder. Training would get ridiculous. My body would complain. My confidence would rise and fall all over the place.

But the thing itself had moved from fantasy into commitment.

That is a strange internal moment. Nothing visible has changed. I did not finish that walk with a support vehicle, a budget, a full crew, or any better idea how to manage four months of daily movement across Australia. But my relationship to the idea changed.

Before, I was carrying a possibility.

After, I was preparing for a departure.

Ordinary People

The phrase that kept coming back was ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

I know phrases like that can become cheap if you print them on enough mugs. But in that season it felt like the only honest way to explain what I was trying to say. I did not want people to look at HAA and think, “Gary is amazing.” I wanted them to think, “What have I written off too early?”

Because I had written myself off for years.

I had assumed I was too far gone, too heavy, too set in my ways, too tired, too funny to need help, too embarrassed to begin properly, too ordinary to be interesting. The transformation was not that I became extraordinary. It was that I stopped using ordinary as an excuse.

The July 2014 version of Hearts Across Australia was still rough. It had ambition ahead of infrastructure. It had belief ahead of detail. It had a fundraising target that may have been bolder than my actual fundraising ability. It had a route, but not yet enough answers about the day-by-day reality of covering it.

But it also had momentum.

The idea had a name now. It had a public page. It had the Heart Foundation. It had no more mr fat guy as its backstory. It had Markus in the wings, helping shape the training. It had the memory of London and Gold Coast behind it. It had a May 2015 start beginning to feel less like a distant concept and more like a date that would eventually arrive whether I was ready or not.

And it had me, somewhere in the middle of a six-hour walk, finally letting myself believe that the mad thing was not only a mad thing.

It was the next thing.

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