Nedd Brockmann reveals all at REA Group’s REAdy25

Nedd Brockman arriving at North Bondi Surf Life Saving Club in Sydney after spending 46 days running 100km per day from Cottesloe Beach in Perth in 2022. Picture: Richard Dobson

Nedd Brockmann was ‘the closest to death he’d ever been’ but he kept on running because he’d made a decision to raise money to solve homelessness.

His feet had swollen — his shoe size had gone from nine-and-a-half to 12-and-a-half — and they were so infected that he was in agony.

But the 1600km run over 12 days at Sydney Olympic Park last October raised more than $4.7m for the homeless charity Mobilize.

Why did he do it? Because he said he would.

The 26-year-old from Forbes told an enthralled audience at the sold-out REA Conference REAdy25 at Randwick Racecourse on Thursday: “Once you say you’re going to do something, you must go through with it.

“People who I’ve trusted in my life are people who said they were going to do something and they’ve gone through with it …they’ve continued to be a person of their word.

“Making decisions is incredibly important, purely because at the end of all of this, we die.

“We don’t leave here alive.”

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Nedd Brockmann on the cover of Stellar, in February, 2023.

You get the sense of how committed — crazy? — Brockmann is by some of his “decisions”. Like the one to keep on running a 34km race after breaking his ankle at the 8km mark.

He’d said he was going to break the record. So he forced himself to keep running.

“I pulled in 34 seconds ahead of the record and won the race … I then went on to think, ‘oh well, I can heal bones with my head!’ ” he said.

Applauding REA Group’s soon to be announced “Home for All Foundation” to help raise funds for the 122,000 people who experience homelessness each night, Brockmann said he decided he could no longer simply walk past people sleeping rough near Sydney’s Central Station.

“I’d see homelessness on the street, there’d be 10 or so people on Eddy Avenue … it was having a profound effect on me, I had to go and do something.

“And so, I went, well, I have to raise money for them.”

The running had started as a way to lose weight through Covid.

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Brockmann crosses the finish line after the gruelling 1600km run at Sydney Olympic Park last year. Picture: Instagram

He’d been “a tubby little tradie who’d played footy at school” who “looked in the mirror one afternoon, took my shirt off, took my shorts off, starkers in the mirror, going, ‘Geez, ‘you do not look good, you’ve got to do something about this’.”

Wearing his five-year-old joggers with holes in them and his footy shorts, he ran one-and-a-half km down Coogee Bay Rd, and then he ran back. “I remember that feeling of elation,” he said.

Every second day after that he added another 2km. “At the end of that two weeks, I had run my first 21km,” he said.

“Now, physio’s worst nightmare, but naivete is bliss.

“And then I thought, how far can I take this.”

He ran 42km, then $60km, then 103km. “I was just elated.”

Then, it all came together for him. “I was lying in bed thinking ‘I’ve got to try to make a life out of this, feel this feeling, amalgamate something, and make it my life pursuit.”

At the same time as he was thinking this, he was going to TAFE for his electrical apprenticeship close by Central Station when he saw all the homeless people.

Nedd Brockmann has now raised more than $7.5m for Mobilize through his running.

He decided to run 50 marathons in 50 days and raised $100k for the Red Cross. Then he ran nearly 4000 km across Australia which he said was an “out-of-body experience”, from Cottesloe Beach to Bondi Beach, raising $2.6m for Mobilize.

He even inspired a five-year-old girl from Geelong called Charlotte to run a km a day to help feed 10,000 homeless there.

“She raised $5,500, and on top of that the Geelong Advertiser did an article and the local government ended up giving $50k for her to keep the charity open that was going to be shutting down at the end of the year.”

His fundraising efforts running have now raised more than $7.5m for Mobilize, which gives cash directly to the individuals, such as a mum who can’t afford to pay the bond for her rental.

“It’s a direct cash transfer that covers that bond, allowing them to continue on and not be homeless.”

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