The heart beating in my chest was a gift. I intend to be worthy of it.

In 2021, a family I will never meet faced the worst day of their lives. In the middle of that grief, they said yes to organ donation. That yes is the only reason I'm here to write this. Someone died. I lived. I don't take a single beat of that for granted.

This October marks five years with my donor heart. I'm a defence veteran, and I've spent most of my life chasing hard things. But nothing has ever focused me like being handed a second life and asked, quietly, what are you going to do with it!

Here's my answer:

In the five years since my transplant, I haven't sat still. I've raced at the World Transplant Games in Perth and the Australian Transplant Games. I've lined up at Mountain bike nationals, cross-country and marathon, at Road nationals, and at multi-day races. Every start line is a thank-you note to my donor. But I always wanted to write a bigger one.

Lying in a hospital bed after my transplant, wired to machines, I made myself a promise: one day I would race Ironman 70.3 Sunshine Coast. This September, I keep that promise. I will be the first Australian male heart transplant recipient to participate in an Ironman event, and it's only the first step. My goal is to become the first Australian heart transplant recipient to finish a full Ironman: a 3.8km swim, a 180km bike, and a 42.2km run. Then in several years, if I'm good enough and lucky enough, to earn a start line at the Ironman World Championship in Kona. No heart transplant recipient has ever done it; I intend to be the first.

But understand this: none of it is about me.

It's about my donor and their family who made the decision and handed me back my life, and making certain that gift is never wasted.

It's about every transplant recipient who has been told to be careful, to expect less, to live smaller. I want them to watch a bloke with a second chance cross an Ironman finish line and think, then what's stopping me.

And it's about you. Because the most powerful thing in this entire story isn't the race, it's the decision one family made to become donors. You can make that same decision. It costs nothing, it takes one minute, and it can save up to seven lives. Mine was one of them.

Here's how you become part of it.

Register to be an organ donor

Right now I'm raising $5,000 to reach the Sunshine Coast start line in the best shape I can:

Travel from Canberra, training, coaching and some race-day equipment.

Every dollar is tax-deductible. Every dollar puts an Australian first within reach.

If you can give, give. If you can't, do the two things that matter even more: Register to be an organ donor, tell your family tonight, and send this to one person who needs to read it.

A stranger gave me their heart.

Help me make it count.

Josh