Before the start line Before the walk

The Crew Became Real

Nineteen days before departure, the support crew stopped being an anxious unknown and became Ben and Ols: two school friends pulled into HAA through Saybubble, timing, and one Joondalup meal.

Date 27 April 2015

Gary with Ben Sutton and Ols Nicholls at Calcutta Curry House in Joondalup — The full road crew became real over a meal in Joondalup: Ben, Ols, and me, nineteen days before departure.

Nineteen days before departure, the full road crew became real over a meal in Joondalup.

That sounds much neater than it felt.

By then, Hearts Across Australia had become a strange mixture of faith, training, logistics, public speaking, sponsor conversations, Facebook updates, and people saying yes to things before any of us knew exactly what those yeses would require. From the outside, it can look as though each piece simply arrived when needed. First the idea. Then the charity. Then the sponsors. Then the crew. Then the campervan. Then the start.

It was not that tidy.

The truth is that HAA kept being built through people. One person opened a door, which put me in a room, which introduced another person, which solved a problem I did not yet know how to solve. That was not magic. It was more practical than that. I kept saying the idea out loud, kept doing the work, kept asking for help, and kept finding that somebody knew somebody.

That is how the support crew eventually appeared.

Saying It In Rooms

JR had been part of the story before most people knew there was a story.

He was one of those connector people who seemed to know half of Perth, and he had already helped me think more practically about the idea of proving that ordinary people could do extraordinary things. Later, in July 2014, he gave me my first public speaking opportunity through Mega Motivation.

That mattered because HAA had never been only about covering distance. The crossing was the visible thing, but underneath it was the message I was trying to understand myself: belief, change, health, courage, and the possibility that a very ordinary person could attempt something far bigger than the life they had previously allowed themselves to imagine.

Speaking put that into rooms.

Big Think 3 widened it. That talk connected me with Josh Smith, and Josh’s Sanford & Smith work led into Saybubble. Saybubble became part of HAA as a sponsor, but even that sentence is too flat. The important thing was not only a logo, a shirt, a website, or digital support. It was the people inside the connection.

Margie Bryant belongs in that same season too, but in a different way. She introduced herself after my Big Think 3 talk, became a steady source of support, and later invited me to speak to her networking group. She was not the Saybubble connector. She was one of the people who helped me believe the speaking side of the story was real.

One of those rooms now has video attached to it: an Out of the Box Biz talk filmed by Pete Liddicoat / Visual Reality Productions, with me putting the no more mr fat guy story and HAA plans into words for people outside the running bubble.

Those rooms mattered. Not because networking is a lovely word to put in a plan, but because HAA was too big to build alone.

The Practical Kind Of Belief

The sponsor story had the same shape.

JR helped open the USANA door as well. That meant vitamins, protein shakes, bars, and supplements for the crossing. It sounds like a sponsor note, but in the lived version it was simpler and more human: a friend and connector helping solve one of the everyday problems before the everyday problems had begun.

Shoes were another problem.

I needed something that could handle my weight, the daily distance, and the repeated impact of trying to move across a continent one day at a time. I had heard a lot about Hokas. Almost too much. They had that slightly cult-like status in the running community, which made me suspicious as much as curious.

Still, one lunchtime I walked across the Narrows Bridge to South Perth to check them out at Runwest.

That was when I met Muz.

Muz heard what I was planning and wanted in. Runwest helped with shoes, Lightfeet socks, and Tailwind. Muz then became the reason Hoka OneOne Australia and Tailwind Nutrition Australia came properly into the story. Roger Hanney and Hoka supplied the shoes I would need. Gavin Markey and Tailwind supplied the fuel powder that would become part of the daily rhythm.

Later, when a big tub of Tailwind arrived in South Perth just after we had left Perth, my friend Scott drove it out along Great Eastern Highway so it could catch up with us.

That was HAA in miniature: something went wrong, I asked, someone helped, and the next piece became possible.

The Crew Problem

The support crew was the biggest practical question of all.

Training my own body was hard, but it was at least my body. Shoes, food, supplements, route planning, sponsors, media, fundraising, all of those things were complicated, but they could be broken down into tasks. Support crew was different. I could not safely cross Australia with enthusiasm and a backpack. I needed people who could live inside the project day after day.

For a while, Markus Forest had looked like that answer. He had been advising me on ultras and was planning to come west as support crew, but life intervened and that plan changed.

That could have become a serious problem.

I told Catherine Madden, my liaison at Saybubble, not to worry. Something else would come up.

I did believe that. I had to. The whole project had been built on putting the idea out there and trusting that the next useful piece might appear if I kept moving toward it. But belief does not make a logistical problem disappear. It just stops you from treating the problem as final.

Catherine talked about it inside Saybubble.

Another Saybubble employee knew Ols, an English backpacker who had come to Australia with plans to travel but had not really done that yet. She phoned him at exactly the right time. Ols was close to cutting his trip short and heading back to the UK.

Instead, the call changed the direction of his trip.

Adelaide, Then Joondalup

There was another piece already sitting in Ols’s own story.

Ben Sutton was his school friend. They had known each other since high school, and Ben was heading to Australia too, due to meet up with Ols in Adelaide. While I was walking back from Bunbury after the 50 km ultra, Ols met Ben in Adelaide and told him the new plan.

That is how one support crew member became two.

I first met Ben and Ols together over a meal and a chat in Joondalup, not long before we set off. The public update from that night was full of excitement, and probably a little relief. Ben had joined Ols as a fully signed-up crazy person. The full road crew was confirmed.

The photo is ordinary in the best possible way. Three blokes at a curry house. Menus on the table. Smiles. Nothing in the image really shows the size of what we were about to ask of each other.

But that is why it matters.

The crossing would need huge things from us, but it would survive through ordinary things. Meals. Chats. Trust. Washing up. Driving. Navigation. Shoe rotation. Food. Laundry. The small daily jobs that stop a huge adventure from collapsing into a pile of good intentions.

By late April, Ben and Ols were no longer an abstract answer to a planning problem. They were people. Young, willing, probably not fully aware of what they had stepped into, and absolutely crucial.

Two Blokes And A Campervan

A few weeks later, they were standing beside the campervan with me on my birthday, the day before we left Canning River parkrun.

By Day 2, they were already doing the work: laundry, washing up, driving, navigating, sorting food, walking sections with me, and learning the rhythm of a crossing that was going to test all three of us in different ways.

That is the thread I do not want to lose.

HAA did not become possible because everything was neatly arranged. It became possible because people kept joining the problem at the exact moment their bit of help mattered.

JR. Big Think. Josh. Saybubble. Margie. Catherine. The Saybubble call to Ols. Ols meeting Ben in Adelaide. Muz taking a punt. USANA, Hoka, Tailwind, Runwest, Scott driving a tub of fuel out along Great Eastern Highway. None of it was a predictable project timeline.

It was a chain of people.

And on 27 April 2015, sitting in Joondalup with Ben and Ols, one of the most important pieces finally had faces.