MORE THAN THREE years before his trans-Australia odyssey, there was the morning of April 14, 2020, when Nedd Brockmann awoke with a simple desire: to run. The sky was still bruised with twilight as he stood in the driveway of the cattle farm his family owned west of Forbes, dressed in baggy footy shorts and a rugby top, a uniform from his days spent on the field with eyes alert, elbows tucked – and a shoulder angled to inflict maximum damage. The top hung looser now, but while mileage may have stripped Brockmann of body fat, it had done nothing to diminish his appetite for suffering.
At 5:30am, he hit the road. The slumber-induced stiffness soon fell away, and a tentative gait gave way to long strides. Even in the eerie stillness of daybreak, he could feel the heat of the sun baking the tarmac and licking at his heels. This much he'd expected. Everything else – the distance, the pacing, the search for rhythm – felt elusive. Previously, the furthest he'd run was the marathon distance of 42.2km. On this morning, he aimed to add another 18 kilometres to that mark. The local Woolworths was 60 kilometres from the family farm – and Brockmann was going to run there. And the Brockmann way is to finish what you start.
As his silhouette loped along that never-ending stretch of Bedgerabong road, life slowly took shape around him: curtains opened; light filled cosy-looking rooms; kettles whistled their song. The people of Forbes hauled themselves into their daily routines, oblivious to the sweat-soaked man outside their windows. As Brockmann approached the halfway mark at Jemalong, he spotted his mum's car up ahead and a hand waving a bottle of water and a packet of Sour Patch Kids out the window. It wasn't exactly what you'd call optimum nutrition. But when you've run 32 kilometres on the fumes of grit, what's another 28 kays with a throat rendered dry and constricted by a sudden assault of citric acid and corn syrup?
He'd told his mum he aimed to reach Woolies inside five hours. When he hit ‘stop’ on his watch outside the supermarket, the time read 4 hr 56 min. The battered sneakers he'd found in his closet a year before had offered about as much cushioning as a sheet of cardboard. He couldn't lower his arms down next to his armpits without triggering the acute pain of skin rubbed raw. Exertion performed on
