Seven Majors, One Year: Keegan Hipgrave’s Quest

Content warning: This article discusses suicide and suicidal thoughts. If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available. You are not alone. Please reach out to a professional or a helpline for support. Call Lifeline on 13 11 14, the Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.

Six days. That’s all Keegan Hipgrave will have between crossing the finish line in Boston and toeing the start in London. It’s the brutal crux of his 2026 mission: all seven World Marathon Majors in a single year, raising $100,000 for men’s health charity Movember. And that’s despite the former NRL player, medically retired at 24 after repeated concussions, once swearing he’d never run again.

He’s been a Movember ambassador since his playing days, but this is something else entirely: a global stage for the message he’s been refining through his podcast, Keegan and Company, for the past two and a half years. The message is simple. When things get hard, lean on the people around you. Or, as Keegan puts it, “Community and physical activity are two of the biggest protectors against poor mental health.”

It’s a lesson that arrived, painfully, when he was 17 years old. One of his best mates, Regan Grieve, was the guy. Great at footy (with Hipgrave, he co-captained the Queensland Schoolboys team), funny, universally respected. The sort of person you’d never suspect was struggling. When Regan took his own life on Australia Day 2015, Keegan was blindsided. “Someone that was so out there, so loud and proud – we just had no idea. So that took us by surprise, really heavily,” he reflects.

“That kind of started my whole mental health journey – of wanting to get into psychology and wanting to have these tools to be able to help friends and family – because we had no idea that he was struggling,” he says. Keegan is sharing all this via a video call from his home on the Gold Coast. The conventionally handsome 28-year-old’s broad smile shines out from under a moustache (of course), and he wears a green cap that proclaims he’s a Morning Person.

While Regan’s death spurred Keegan on to become an advocate for Movember, for years he didn’t truly address the loss. “If I’m being fully transparent, I probably didn’t think about it and I didn’t know how to process it,” he admits. “I probably just put it in a box for five years.” It wasn’t until he started speaking publicly about Regan on other people’s podcasts that the grief resurfaced. He got emotional. Then Regan’s mother, Angela, saw a clip and reached out. The two hadn’t spoken in years. Keegan apologised for missing the funeral and for not first seeking permission to speak about her son. Her response floored him. “Her biggest fear was that his name would be forgotten and no one would talk about him,” Keegan recalls. “And she loved the fact that I was talking about him and how much he meant to me.” This year, Keegan attended Regan’s 10-year memorial.

By then, Keegan’s own playing career had already ended – abruptly and involuntarily. He’d signed with the Brisbane Broncos under-20s at 18, then moved to the Gold Coast Titans and made his NRL debut at 20. His idol growing up was Broncos captain Corey Parker, who’d debuted at 18 and bought his first house the same year. Keegan set himself similar targets: an NRL debut and a first home before turning 20. He missed the debut by a whisker – “I was just after the fact,” he laughs – but eventually achieved both goals.

Hipgrave played an aggressive style of footy that made him effective but vulnerable. In 2019, after a string of knockouts, a neurologist told him to take 12 months off. He came back, moved to the Parramatta Eels in pursuit of a premiership and played a full season, sustaining more concussions. “The same thing – I had three three big knockouts,” Keegan notes. His last came in Round 26 against Penrith, when a tackle on his off-field friend Tevita Pangai Jr went wrong. “My head hit the back of the ground,” Keegan says. “There’s actually some photos and videos of it, which are pretty ugly to watch.” The symptoms lingered for months: headaches, mood swings, emotional volatility. After six weeks, when everyone else had gone on holidays, Keegan was still suffering. The neurologist’s recommendation was unequivocal: medically retire.

There were tears and a mourning period. But once Keegan made peace with the decision, he reframed it. “Touch wood, my body’s actually pretty good,” he says. “I didn’t have the big ACL or the big shoulder reconstructions. So I got away pretty safely.” He’d already finished a bachelor of business and was halfway through an MBA. He was curious about psychology. Retirement, it turned out, was a beginning.

He launched his podcast, Keegan and Company, in 2023. The premise was straightforward: get athletes to talk openly about their mental health – not just the struggles, but the strategies that actually helped. “While the athletes might open up and be super vulnerable, which is great, the best conversations are the ones where they talk about what actually helped them,” Keegan explains.

He points to an episode with Collingwood’s Brayden Maynard, who discussed his OCD publicly for the first time. Maynard hadn’t planned to go there, but mid-conversation he decided it might help people. He shared practical tools: getting off his phone an hour before bed, breathwork, talking to his psychologist. “Even afterwards, he was like, ‘Fuck, did I do the right thing?’ “ Keegan recalls. “But then once the feedback came through, he’s just like, ‘Man, that was really great.’ “ With the spotlight given to professional sport in Australia, it meant that parents could sit their kids down in front of the episode to show them they weren’t alone. “They might have been just diagnosed, and it says, ‘You’re not weird; you’re not unusual – Bruzzy’s going through the exact same thing.’ “

The podcast now has 160 episodes, with guests ranging from Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus to founders like LSKD’s Jason Daniels. Recently, Keegan stepped into it full-time – hiring an editor, a virtual assistant and a content producer. The next phase is global expansion, which is where the seven majors come in.

Before we get to that though, you need to know something about Keegan: when he was playing professional footy, he swore he’d never run again when he was done with it. “Fuck, I hated running,” he laughs. But following his enforced retirement he found himself craving new challenges. He entered City2Surf on a whim and met a stranger named Ben at the start line. Fourteen kilometres later, Ben had talked him into entering the Ultra-Trail Australia 50km, with only 10 weeks to prepare. “I was very ignorant to the fact of actually having to put a good prep in,” Keegan admits.

He’s since completed the UTA 50 twice, run the Gold Coast Half, Sydney Marathon and Point to Pinnacle – the half marathon up kunanyi, Mount Wellington, in Tasmania that he did with Movember. “I have my best conversations out on a long run with crew,” he says. “When you’re in the thick of it, when it’s hard, the conversation is super flowy. It’s a great way to check in.”

Keegan has been training for the half Ironman in Busselton, Western Australia, this Sunday 7 December, which he’ll tackle before launching into his 12-week block for the first of his seven majors: Tokyo. His coach is Craig Alexander, the three-time Ironman world champion. He’s sitting at 98 kilograms, heavier than he’d like, but he’s building capacity. He believes the challenge ahead of him will be hard, just out of reach currently, but something he should be able to achieve with the right dedication. “Putting yourself in a position where you’re a little bit unsure if you can do it – that’s where you see a lot of the growth, right?”

Four of the seven entries came through Movember’s charity partnership. The others are being secured through travel partners and sponsors. Boston, notoriously hard to get a bib for, remains elusive. Even Whoop – one of Keegan’s partners and a marathon sponsor headquartered in Boston – can’t get tickets. “We’re hustling so hard,” he says. If all else fails, he’ll run it the night before with the crew – shoutout Brick Layers Union – who unofficially trace the course the evening before the race. It’ll still count in his eyes. And it’ll still be part of the story.

That storytelling is central to the project. Keegan plans to document the entire year through YouTube and socials, recording podcast episodes in each city. But the real hook is simpler. Through Movember, he’s giving away two spots to run the Sydney Marathon alongside him – one for a donor and one for their friend. Because that’s the point. “When life gets hard, you want to lean on those around you,” he says.

“The company we keep.” It’s the podcast’s tagline and, increasingly, Hipgrave’s philosophy for embracing mental wellness and powering through. “The people you knock around with – that’s the heart and soul of this whole journey,” he says as he signs off. Those are wise words we should all embrace. During what’s been described as an epidemic of loneliness, running with friends, a crew or a community can help us connect. That’s a powerful incentive, whether it’s to go for your first ever jog or finish your seventh marathon in a single year.

Donate to Keegan’s Movember campaign here. Enter the Sydney Marathon giveaway here – entries close 31 January 2026.

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, you’re not alone. Call Lifeline on 13 11 14, the Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.