Burnie, Tasmania · Born 28 August 1939, Moravia
To the man who showed me,
without ever saying a word about it,
that it is never too late to become who you were meant to be.
There are moments in life where you realise the person who shaped everything about you is still right there, in a little house in Burnie, Tasmania — and that almost no one outside your family knows who they are or what they've done.
This is my attempt to fix that.
My father's name is Vlastislav Skvaril. Most people who know him call him Vlastik. He was born in the Moravian region of Czechoslovakia on 28 August 1939 — the same week that World War II began. He survived Allied bombs as a boy. He watched the communists take his country apart piece by piece and fire his parents from their jobs for refusing to join the Party. And when Soviet tanks rolled back into Prague in August 1968, he made a decision that would change everything: he was leaving.
He arrived in Australia in 1969 with my mother Josefa, my brother, and me — on a plane with 168 refugees, only one of whom spoke English. He worked in a -32 degree freezer. He built a life from absolutely nothing. And then, at the age of 57, he decided to take up running.
Please understand what I mean when I say "take up running." I don't mean he started doing a few laps around the park on weekends. I mean he entered the Spartathlon — a 246 kilometre race from Athens to Sparta that only one in three competitors even finishes. I mean he won the Victorian 24-Hour Track Championship. I mean he set a world record. I mean he ran from Tasmania to Cape York — over 5,000 kilometres — and then turned around and ran across the width of Australia — nearly 6,000 kilometres more. I mean he pushed a scooter from Darwin to Adelaide on his 70th birthday. I mean he raised over $100,000 for sick children, not because anyone asked him to, but because it felt to him like the right thing to do.
He is 85 years old now. He has an Order of Australia Medal. And he is still, to this day, one of the most quietly extraordinary people I have ever known.
I started Lose to Win as a project about reaching your potential at any age. I have talked a lot about my own journey — getting back into shape at 60, proving that it's never too late. But I have never told you about the man who showed me all of that was possible before I ever believed it myself.
This is his story. Or at least as much of it as I can do justice to in these pages.
I hope when you've finished reading, you feel the way I've felt my whole life: that you are standing in the shadow of someone truly remarkable, and wondering — quietly — what's stopping you from doing something extraordinary with the time you've got left too.
Because that is exactly what my father would say if you asked him.
Nothing is stopping you. Not really.
If you met my father on the street in Burnie today, you would probably notice an upright, lean man with a firm handshake and a direct way of looking at you. You might notice the Medal of the Order of Australia in the front room, if you were invited inside. You would almost certainly notice that he is far fitter than most men half his age.
What you would not notice — because he would never mention it — is that the man standing before you once ran barefoot in the dark through a mountain pass at three in the morning, somewhere between Athens and Sparta. That he once ran 78 days straight across the top half of Australia, in summer, through the outback. That he set a world record at 65. That a Member of Australian Federal Parliament once stood up in the House and named him as an inspiration to the nation.
He never made a fuss about any of it. That is the most Dad thing I can tell you about him.
He is, in the simplest terms, the man my entire philosophy is built on. When I talk about "it's never too late," I am not quoting a motivational poster. I am describing my father.
I have spent 60 years watching him quietly do things that most people would consider impossible — and then come home, make himself a coffee, and not bring it up unless someone asked. That combination of total commitment and total indifference to recognition is something I have tried to carry, imperfectly, my whole life.
"He is inspired to run by the young people he meets who live every day with cancer and still get so much out of life."
— ABC News, 2004Dad grew up in a country where showing off was dangerous. Where the wrong word to the wrong person could cost you your job, your freedom, or worse. He learned early that the only measure of a man that mattered was what he actually did — not what he said, not what title he held, not who approved of him. That lesson never left him. It was baked into everything he did in Australia, in every role he played, in every kilometre he ran.
His wife — my mother Josefa, known to everyone as Jo — has been beside him through all of it. For every major run, Jo was in a battered campervan pulling up beside him at the end of each day, making sure he ate, making sure he slept, making sure he was safe. Dad will always tell you straight away that she deserves more credit than he does. I believe him.
My father was born on 28 August 1939 in the Moravian region of Czechoslovakia — the same week, almost to the day, that Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began. He was five years old when his town was bombed. His mother gathered all four children — the eldest was seven, the youngest seven months old — and ran through the explosions to safety while his father was at work. He has never forgotten it.
He grew up under communist rule after the war, and the communists made their presence felt in small, grinding ways. His father was fired from the police force — deemed politically unreliable. His mother was removed from her job as a primary school teacher for the same reason. Their crime? Refusing to join the Communist Party. Refusing to pretend to believe in something they didn't believe in.
Dad took the same lesson and carried it forward. He studied dairy production at the technical school in Kroměříž. He did his military service as a nurse. He built a career in the dairy industry — Liberec, then Hodonín. And when the Party came calling, offering bonuses and promotions in exchange for membership, he said no. Every time.
In August 1968, Soviet tanks rolled back into Prague. Dad was there. He joined the protests. He painted over road signs to confuse the occupying forces — a small act of defiance that could easily have landed him in a cell. The police had started keeping files on people like him. The message was becoming clear: fall into line or face the consequences.
"I joined protests against the tanks. I painted over signs. And I knew: once they have your name, there is only one direction this goes."
— Vlastik Skvaril, The Czechoslovak Talks, 2018So he made a plan to leave. And in classic Vlastik Skvaril fashion, the plan was both audacious and quietly brilliant. He found someone travelling to Austria and had them post back a letter — supposedly an invitation from a made-up Austrian address. He used that letter to obtain exit permits for the family. On 28 September 1969, he and Mum boarded a flight with my brother and me, along with 168 other Czechoslovak refugees, on a Boeing 707 leased by the Australian government. Of the 168 people on that plane, exactly one spoke English.
He arrived in Adelaide on a Wednesday, knowing essentially nothing about the country he was about to call home for the rest of his life. By Friday he was already working at an Amscol ice cream factory, in a storage freezer at minus 32 degrees Celsius. The summer outside hit 40. He went from one extreme to the other, physically and figuratively, and he just got on with it.
I think of that a lot. I think about what it takes to leave behind every street, every face, every familiar thing — your language, your culture, your entire world — and start completely over in a country where you cannot even hold a basic conversation. Most people today would call that terrifying. Dad would probably just shrug and say there wasn't a choice.
That is something I think about every time I feel like something is hard.
The path to Burnie came through another Czech migrant — a man named Milan Vyhnálek, who had founded Lactos, a specialty cheese company on Tasmania's north-west coast that would eventually become Australia's largest specialty cheese producer. Vyhnálek needed someone with serious dairy production expertise. Dad had it. So around 1970, the family moved to Burnie, and it has been home ever since.
Lactos was where Dad found his footing in Australia. He was good at the work — genuinely good, the kind of person who understood both the technical craft and the business side of things. By 1972 he was leading a major contract project to develop Japanese-style Gouda cheese, and spent three months in Japan overseeing it. He eventually rose to become factory manager at Lactos, a long way from the freezer floor in Adelaide.
After Lactos, he and Mum opened Chic Queen — a takeaway and grocery store they ran together for eight years. Open every single day of the year. Monday to Thursday, 8am to 8pm. Friday through Sunday, 8am to midnight. Not one day closed. I am not sure my father knows what a day off feels like, even now.
His philosophy in those shop years was simple: a customer gets what a customer wants. He wasn't interested in excuses, inconvenience, or half measures. If something needed doing, you did it. That ethic — patient, consistent, unrelenting — runs through every single thing he has ever done, whether it was making cheese, running a shop, or running to Cape York.
"A customer gets what a customer wants."
— Vlastik SkvarilAfter the shop, he moved into real estate for a few years, then spent seven years in cheese factory research and development. He retired, finally, somewhere around 2006 — at approximately 67. By which point he had already been competing in ultramarathons for nearly a decade.
The Czech community in Burnie knows him as one of their own — recognised, by those who track such things, as the best-known Czech person in Tasmania. The wider Burnie community simply knows him as Vlastik, the bloke who keeps running enormous distances for kids with cancer, and who at 85 still looks like he's training for something.
My father took up serious running at 57. Not jogging. Not a fun run here and there. Serious, structured, competitive ultramarathon running — the kind of running that involves covering the length of a marathon and then just… continuing for another 200 kilometres.
I want you to sit with that for a moment, because I think it gets glossed over too quickly. Most elite athletes retire well before 40. Most people who take up running as adults start with a 5km app and a new pair of shoes. Dad walked into the sport at 57 and within a handful of years was competing against — and beating — people who had been running their entire lives.
He didn't overthink his start. He just started. And that is the most important sentence in this entire publication.
Distance: 246 kilometres. Time: 35 hours, 5 minutes, 38 seconds. Age at finish: 60–61.
The Spartathlon follows the route a Spartan messenger named Pheidippides ran in 490BC to ask Sparta's help against the Persian army at Marathon. It climbs a 1,200-metre mountain pass in the dark. It has a cutoff time that, according to official statistics, eliminates approximately two in every three starters.
Dad ran it. He finished. His official result is confirmed in the Spartathlon database to this day — Bib number 35, born 1939, Australia.
In 2001, aged 61, he entered the Coburg 24-Hour Carnival in Victoria — the Victorian 24-Hour Track Championship. Twenty-four hours. A 400-metre track. Around and around and around, through the day and through the night.
He won. 193.087 kilometres. The next finisher was 17 kilometres behind him. His name is still listed on the official Coburg 24-hour champions list.
Distance covered: 193.087 km in 24 hours. Age: 61–62.
Won the overall championship outright, not just his age group. The full official results from 7–8 April 2001 confirm his placing. He is listed on the Coburg 24hr history page as the 2001 champion.
Then in 2002, at 62, he entered the Simpson Desert Challenge — 380 kilometres of outback South Australia, on foot, over six days. He finished first among all Australian competitors, and second overall in the world.
Distance: 380 km over 6 days. Age: 62–63.
First Australian to finish this gruelling desert crossing, second in the world overall. Confirmed in the Federal Parliament speech of 5 June 2008 by MP Sid Sidebottom.
And then, in 2005, he set the record that officially put his name in the books of world athletics.
Distance in 48 hours: 278 km. Age: 65–66.
Set during the Cliff Young Australian Six Day Race in Colac, Victoria. Confirmed in the official DUV ultramarathon statistics database and in the Federal Parliament speech. At the same race, the legendary Yiannis Kouros — widely regarded as the greatest ultramarathon runner who has ever lived — was attempting his own world record. Dad gave Kouros his ice vest to help him stay cool during the critical final stages of that attempt. That says everything you need to know about my father.
"He broke the 48-hour world age track record by completing 278 kilometres during the first 48 hours of the Cliff Young Australian Six Day Race at Colac in 2005."
— Sid Sidebottom MP, Federal Parliament, 5 June 2008Mentioned in Parliament, by name, for setting a world record, at 65, after taking up running at 57. In a sport where most champions peak before 35.
If that isn't the definition of it's never too late, I don't know what is.
If you have ever stood at the tip of Cape York in far north Queensland and looked at where it sits on a map of Australia, you already understand what I am about to tell you. It is as far north as Australia goes. It is the top — the absolute top — of a continent that measures 3,860 kilometres from its northern to its southern coast. Now imagine starting at the southern tip of Tasmania, looking at Cape York, and deciding you will run there.
My father was 66 years old when he decided to do this.
He ran every single day without rest days, averaging somewhere around 60 kilometres a day. Mum drove a 25-year-old campervan just ahead of him or just behind, pulling over wherever he needed water, food, or rest. The run took 92 days. They covered roughly 5,500 kilometres. He arrived at Cape York four days before turning 67.
The students at the Northern Peninsula Area College in Bamaga — the remote school near Australia's tip — put on a parade for him when he arrived. Children who had never met this 66-year-old Czech-Australian from Burnie came out to cheer him in. He has talked about that moment ever since.
The money raised went to Camp Quality — a charity supporting children and families affected by cancer. He raised $25,000 — every cent went directly to charity. Every expense of the run came out of his own pocket.
Distance: approximately 5,500 km. Duration: 92 days. Charity: Camp Quality. Raised: $25,000.
Featured on ABC Radio National's Bush Telegraph programme, August 2006. Arrived Cape York 4 days before his 67th birthday.
Two years later, at 68, he went bigger.
The new plan was to run across the width of the Australian mainland — not the coast, but inland, through the red dirt and relentless heat of the Australian interior. West to east. Shark Bay, Western Australia, to Cape Byron, New South Wales. As far as anyone could confirm, no one had ever run this route before.
He started on 20 July 2008, at Shark Bay, with the Indian Ocean behind him. He ran 57 kilometres a day, every day, for 100 days. Mum was there in the same old campervan. On 28 August 2008 — his 69th birthday — he was somewhere in the centre of Australia, running. By late October, he reached Cape Byron and the Pacific Ocean.
The charity was CanTeen — supporting young Australians aged 12 to 25 living with cancer. His target was $50,000.
Distance: approximately 5,768 km. Duration: 100 days. Charity: CanTeen. Target: $50,000.
Confirmed as the first person to run inland west-to-east across the Australian mainland. Covered an average of 57 km/day. Media coverage included Planet Ultramarathon (international running press), The Advocate, and syndicated wire reports that reached as far as the Khaleej Times in the UAE.
"I think I am more fit than I was when I was 18. It will be the biggest challenge for sure."
— Vlastik Skvaril, age 68, before the Shark Bay to Cape Byron runI want to be clear about what these runs represent — not just as athletic achievements, but as acts of character. He was not running to prove something to rival athletes or to win prize money or to be famous. He was running because children with cancer were still getting out of bed every morning. That seemed like the right reason to keep running to him.
In the Parliament speech that honoured him, MP Sid Sidebottom called him "the veritable Forrest Gump of Braddon." I understand why. But I'd go further than that. Forrest Gump just ran because he didn't know when to stop. My father ran because he had a very clear idea of exactly why he was doing it — and then he didn't stop until the job was done.
By 2009, my father recognised that people had started to get used to him completing enormous charity runs. If you do extraordinary things long enough, they start to feel ordinary to the people watching. He needed to find a way to keep the fundraising attention alive.
His solution? On his 70th birthday — the 28th of August, 2009 — he pushed off from Darwin on a push scooter, heading south.
The scooter had been donated by Cadbury Schweppes. The route followed the Stuart Highway: Darwin through Tennant Creek, Alice Springs, Coober Pedy, Port Augusta, and finally Adelaide. 3,200 kilometres. He averaged 80 kilometres a day. His best single day? 140 kilometres, with a tail wind.
He completed it in 40 days. He was 70 years old. ABC News covered it with the headline: "Man, 70, scoots across Australia." The Czech Embassy in Prague issued a promotional PDF about it. He raised money for CanTeen and Camp Quality. He arrived back from Darwin older, fitter, and planning the next thing.
Distance: 3,200 km. Duration: 40 days (started 28 August 2009, his 70th birthday; completed 6 October 2009). Average pace: 80 km/day. Best day: 140 km.
Covered by ABC News Australia; promoted by the Czech Embassy Prague. Scooter donated by Cadbury Schweppes.
In 2013, he pulled a rickshaw from Hobart to Burnie — roughly 350 kilometres — for Make-A-Wish. In 2014, aged 74, he ordered a $90 kangaroo suit online and rode a scooter from Cambridge to Burnie in it, over seven days, for CanTeen and Make-A-Wish combined. I am not making this up. The Mercury ran the story. He had an excellent reason for the kangaroo suit — plain long-distance charity runs were starting to feel too routine, and he needed to attract attention to keep the money coming. He put on the suit, he got on the scooter, and he went.
In 2016, aged 76, he pulled the rickshaw again — Hobart to Burnie. 350 kilometres. He slept rough. He ate canned food. In Launceston, a friend put him up for a night, and he described it as "like a five-star hotel." He arrived in Burnie flying an Australian flag.
Across his entire charity fundraising career — runs, scooter rides, rickshaw pulls, kangaroo suit rides — Dad raised over $100,000 for Make-A-Wish Foundation, Camp Quality and CanTeen. Over $100,000, all from pushing and pulling his own body across the Australian landscape, one kilometre at a time.
"Long-distance charity runs had become more common. He needed to do something different."
— The Mercury, March 2014That is not just dedication to fitness. That is dedication to something bigger than yourself. That is a life lived in service, wrapped in a ridiculously good kangaroo suit.
In 2020, at around 80 years of age, my father had a stroke. He woke up in Mersey Community Hospital in Latrobe, Tasmania, half paralysed. By his own account, in the early days, he wanted to die.
He has never been someone to exaggerate or be dramatic. So when he later wrote publicly about that period, the honesty of it meant something. He had spent decades doing things that were, by any reasonable measure, physically impossible for a man his age. And here he was, lying in a hospital bed, unable to move the way he needed to move, wondering if this was how it ended.
What brought him back was a nurse named Dorothy.
He has said, plainly, that the nurses saved his life — not just medically, but in the deeper sense. The doctors, the physiotherapists, the kitchen staff, the cleaners. The people who showed up every day and treated him with care. He wrote about it publicly in a personal essay — "My Stroke Journey" — which was shared on the ABC News and ABC Australian Story Facebook pages. In it, he described completely reversing his previously held views on euthanasia. The stroke gave him something he hadn't expected: a reason to understand, fully, what it feels like to be on the receiving end of human kindness at your most vulnerable. It changed him.
"I thought I couldn't recover. I never thought I would be walking, even during my time at Latrobe hospital."
— Vlastik Skvaril, "My Stroke Journey", 2020He recovered. Of course he recovered. He got back on a treadmill. He set himself the goal of returning to jogging. And in January 2025, at 85 years of age, he received the Medal of the Order of Australia — standing upright, eyes bright, with an excellent story about how he got there.
I think about the stroke differently to how most people probably would. I don't see it as a detour from Dad's story. I see it as one of the most important parts of it. Because for someone who had spent 30 years proving that physical limits didn't apply to him, the real test was always going to be the limit that couldn't be trained away. The thing that just happened, regardless of how fit you were. And when that came, he did what he had always done: he absorbed the blow, refused to be finished by it, and came back.
That is the lesson that matters most. Not the 278-kilometre record. Not the 5,768-kilometre run. It's this: when everything was taken away and he had to start again from lying flat in a hospital bed, he started again. Because that's what he does.
On Australia Day 2025, the Governor-General of Australia announced the Australia Day Honours List, and on it was my father's name. Vlastislav Skvaril. Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM), General Division. Citation: "For service to the community through charitable organisations."
The Advocate in Burnie ran the story. The Governor of Tasmania shared it on social media. The ultra-running community in Australia celebrated, with at least one prominent group describing him simply as an "Ultra Legend." He was 85 years old.
The medal was personally presented to him by the Governor of Tasmania.
When he was asked about it, Dad responded in exactly the way you would expect him to respond. He said, paraphrasing: there were so many kilometres, so many stops, so many kisses. He had a good time. And he was quick to point out that Jo — Mum — deserves more credit than he does.
"There were so many kilometres, so many stops, so many kisses... I had a good time."
— Vlastik Skvaril OAM, on receiving the Honour, age 85
This is not a man who collected accolades. This is a man who, for decades, got up in the morning and did the next hard thing because it was the next hard thing. The medal is the country's way of acknowledging something that everyone in Burnie already knew: that one of their own had spent 30 years putting his body on the line for sick children and for the sheer stubborn joy of proving what a human being is capable of.
In a timeline that runs from a bombed Moravian town in 1944 to an OAM citation in 2025, the medal is maybe not the most remarkable thing on the list. But it is the official version. It is the permanent record. And it puts his name — our name — into Australian history in exactly the way it deserves to be there.
He came to this country with nothing. He leaves it with an honour from the nation itself, a family who loves him, a community he helped build, and a legacy in the race results and news archives of every state in this country.
Not bad for a man from Moravia who decided to go for a run at 57.
My father is not a man who delivers speeches about personal development. He has never sat me down and handed me a list of principles to live by. What he did instead was harder and more effective: he just lived them. In front of me. For my entire life. And whether I realised it at the time or not, I absorbed every single one.
No coach scouted Dad. No one identified his potential. He decided at 57 that he wanted to run — and he ran. Nobody gave him a green light. He didn't wait for one. That is the first and most important lesson.
He ran 5,768 kilometres and mentioned it once, quietly, if you asked. The work was the point. Not the recognition. If you are doing something for the applause, you will quit when it goes quiet. He never quit.
He arrived in a foreign country unable to speak the language and worked in a -32 degree freezer. He did not describe this as an obstacle. He described it as the beginning. The circumstances of your starting point do not determine your finishing point.
He didn't grow up an athlete. He became one — through daily, relentless, unglamorous consistency. Every day. Not on the days he felt good. Every day. That is still the most underrated concept in health, fitness, and life.
He ran for kids with cancer. He didn't need the world's attention. He needed the children who needed the money to get it. That sense of purpose — real purpose, tied to other people — is what kept him going for 30 years.
57, 60, 65, 70, 76 — he kept going. And when the stroke tried to end it, he restarted from a hospital bed. This is the lesson that sits underneath everything I do with Lose to Win. I didn't invent it. I watched it happen, my entire life, in my father's front room in Burnie.
The Lose to Win philosophy — the idea that sustainable beats perfect, that ordinary people doing consistent things achieve extraordinary results, that it's never too late to become who you were meant to be — that all comes from one source. It comes from watching a man who fled communist Czechoslovakia at 30 and then, at 57, quietly decided he wasn't finished yet.
I don't need a poster for that. I have the real thing, in Burnie, Tasmania, 85 years old, probably on a treadmill.
Someone asked me recently where my conviction comes from. The conviction that it's actually possible to turn things around at 50, or 60, or 70. The belief that age is not the final word. The refusal to treat "too old" as a real category.
The honest answer is: it comes from my father. All of it. Every single bit of it.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: well, that's easy for him to say. His dad is a world record holder. His dad ran across Australia. His dad is extraordinary.
Yes. But here is the thing: he wasn't always. He was 56 once, and he hadn't run a kilometre in his life. He was a former refugee working in a cheese factory who'd been through communism, immigration, a failed shop, real estate, and retirement — and he still didn't know yet that he was extraordinary.
He found out by starting.
That is the whole message. That is every newsletter I have ever written. That is the Lose to Win philosophy in its most complete form. You do not discover what you're capable of by thinking about it. You discover it by beginning — imperfectly, late, without the right equipment, without anyone's permission — and seeing what happens when you don't stop.
I do not know what your version of running across Australia is. Maybe it's losing 20 kilograms. Maybe it's getting off the couch for a walk every morning. Maybe it's finishing a race you've always thought was beyond you. Whatever it is, I want you to hear this name — Vlastik Skvaril, OAM, Burnie, Tasmania — and understand that he began from exactly the same place you're beginning from.
He just didn't stop.
Neither should you.
Born Moravia, Czechoslovakia, 28 August 1939.
Settled Burnie, Tasmania, 1970.
Still going.