‘It’ll be like a montage’: James Brougham urges community to take part in marathon to celebrate running 500km

One bloke, his two kids and a wheelbarrow make up a team raising funds for Royal Flying Doctor Service by running around Dampier, and are calling on locals to join in one final run this weekend. James Brougham, 31, sailed with his two young children from Fremantle to Dampier over fourth month as part of a journey to show his daughters what the world had to offer. When he arrived in the Pilbara town, Brougham decided to run 500km while pushing Halle, 6, and Isla, 2, in a wheelbarrow to raise $10,000 for the Royal Flying Doctor Service’s Oceans to Outback challenge. He plans to cap off the effort with a marathon-length lap-run around Dampier this weekend, and is calling on the community to come out and join him. “It will be like a montage,” he said. The run, which Mr Brougham hopes will look like a scene from Rocky 2, will take place on October 30 and will conclude his efforts to run 500km in one month. “I hope everyone comes down,” he said. “At the end of the day, I think i’ll probably be a bit disappointed when it’s all over but it would be great to have a massive finish.” Currently, Mr Brougham plans to either run a full marathon to Karratha and back or do as many laps as possible around Dampier, depending on how his daughters are holding up in the wheelbarrow. “We’ve just gotten so much attention and I know I can do way more kilometres than what we’re doing but it’s just depends how much I can get the girls to go along with really,” he said. “Because if they’re struggling and they’re not having fun. . . I don’t want to push them too hard. “But I think if we can round up enough people to keep the girls occupied it’ll be good. We’ll start at 5.30am, so if we can keep the kids occupied for five hours, I think we could probably do it.” When Mr Brougham arrived in Dampier he wanted to get back into training for running ultramarathons and decided to raise funds for the RFDS. “It’s only me and the girls so there’s nowhere to put them, so I worked out of the wheelbarrow was going to be the best option and certainly be able to handle the most amount of terrain and kilometres,” he said. The 31-year-old said he decided to move into the boat with his daughters for a different kind of life from suburbia. “Things were very set, and I didn’t like the idea of that so I wanted to show them what it was like out here,” he said. “And travel and see things and do things a little differently to how everyone else is doing it.” Mr Brougham said he and the girls had seen some “out-of-the-world” experiences. “We’ve been 60km offshore and seen pods of 30-odd dolphins jumping through the waves along the boat,” he said. “I don’t think they realise quite what they’ve seen.”