CNN
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To get a sense of just how huge Australia really is, just ask Nedd Brockmann. He found out the hard way.
When Brockmann arrived at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on Monday – his distinctive, bleach-blonde hi-top tucked under a baseball cap – it signaled the end of a 2,456-mile (3,953 km) running journey that had begun 47 days earlier on the opposite side of Australia.
The 23-year-old has a hard time knowing where to begin as he recounts the physical toll his body has been put through since taking off from Perth’s Cottesloe Beach last month – the countless injuries, the endless aching joints, the Sleep deprivation, the blisters, or even the maggots growing in his toes.
It all explains the joy and relief on Brockmann’s face when he finally arrived in front of hordes of people at Bondi – Australia’s legendary surfing beach – and celebrated the occasion by sipping champagne from his sweat-soaked shoe.
“I went through hell and back 10 times to get there — through every injury, all the sun, the rain, the trailer trucks, the fatalities, the weather, the headwinds,” Brockmann told CNN Sport. “Just getting through that and then finally seeing how many people were in Bondi was out of this world. I could not believe it.”
Brockmann, an electrician originally from Forbes, New South Wales, has endeared himself so well to the Australian public over the course of his transnational run that many are calling for him to be crowned Australian of the Year in 2023.
As of Friday, he has raised two million Australian dollars ($1.26 million) – almost double his original goal – for homeless charity We Are Mobilize by walking across Australia and averaging more than 50 for 47 days miles per day.
Brockmann started running before the pandemic, especially to lose weight. His love for the sport began to grow, as did the length of his runs – from half marathons to marathons to ultramarathons of up to 100km.
In 2020, he decided to run 50 marathons in 50 days, raising nearly A$100,000 (US$63,000) for the Red Cross in the process.
His appetite for an ever-increasing challenge saw him run across Australia earlier this year, eventually hitting the road on September 1 – a journey that would take him to the brink of his physical limits and beyond.
The first major hurdle came on Day 12, when severe inflammation around a tendon in his shin prevented Brockmann from walking at all. He drove 14 hours with his team for an MRI scan and, after receiving three injections to relieve the pain, drove 14 hours back to his planned route to continue his run, now armed with an ankle strap to tie his lifting foot off the ground.
And that wasn’t the only physical obstacle he would face.
“(There was) the knee pain, I had a lot of foot pain, the IT [iliotibial] Ligaments were gone, my hips were pretty bad, glutes – it was pretty nice all around, the injuries,” says Brockmann.
“If you get injured, you’re going to get injured at the number of kilometers we run. So it’s in your head – it’s not physical, it’s a mind game.”
Adding to his injuries was a chronic lack of sleep – Brockmann says he survived the first three weeks on two hours of sleep a night – and the ever-present challenge of consuming between 8,000 and 10,000 calories a day to offset the 10,000 to 12,000 he was burning.
“Oatmeal with banana and coffee in the mornings,” he says of his diet, “and then I ate bacon and egg rolls — two of them — apple turnovers, pancakes, donuts, ham and cheese croissants, chicken wraps, ham and cheese toasts.” You name it, I ate it.
Brockmann mostly drove alongside traffic on Australia’s long, straight roads and also had to deal with 30-ton trucks that regularly rattled past him.
“Every third vehicle is a big truck with four trailers, three trailers trying to get me off the road,” he says. “So that was pretty alarming… and some of the winds when they pass you – they just pull you onto the track and pull you away. With my little character I’ve been thrown around now.”
Over the course of his 47-day run, Brockmann learned to persevere. “Make yourself comfortable when you’re uncomfortable” became the mantra he captioned his daily posts on Instagram, along with updates about the amount of pain pulsing through his body.
“I’ve never seen an athlete like this who can take pain and keep pushing forward,” Brockman’s physical therapist wrote in an Instagram post this week. “It redefined the amount of pain and suffering someone can endure.”
Brockmann puts it differently. “I think 70-80% of it was like, ‘We’re in the depths of hell,'” he says, “and 20% of it was pretty okay.”
After weeks of waking up at 3:30am to avoid running too long in Australia’s relentless heat, Brockmann is now ready to catch up on some sleep. He has no immediate plans to return to his full-time job as an electrician, but to take time to reflect on what he has just accomplished.
He was four days short of the fastest ever crossing of Australia on foot, but he believes it was a blessing in disguise.
“People were just so enthusiastic about getting up every day, and that’s exactly what this run has become,” says Brockmann. “I think if everything was just based on the record I wouldn’t have had that support; we would not have raised that money and we would not be where we are today.”
And for all the pain he’s endured and the relief he feels now that hours of roadside frolicking is over, a part of him will also miss the ups and downs of the past seven weeks.
“I know I’m going to fall and I’ll be pretty down,” says Brockmann. “It’s about talking about it, getting it out there and looking forward to life now.”