On Monday afternoon, 23-year-old Nedd Brockmann finished his run from Perth in Western Australia to Bondi Beach in Sydney. That’s a distance of 3844km or 2389 miles. Media in Australia is reporting several different distances but 3844km/2389 miles appears to be the shortest and the one that Brockmann is claiming on his website (below).
There’s also some confusion over the number of days it took with claims of 40-47 days. Assuming he left as he said he did on September 1, it was a 47-day journey. That’s an average of just under 82km per day (50.83 miles).
His website is short on details, big on merch and donations – he’s raised nearly $2million Australian dollars (circa US$1.25m).
My wife and children had followed the run on Instagram and we went down to Bondi on Monday afternoon to cheer Nedd home. This was when I got my first whiff of Robert Young. He didn’t look anywhere near as trashed and wasted as I’d expected of a bloke who’d spent 47 consecutive days on the road. He looked fit and thin-ish, but not like someone who had just run nearly 4000km (one of the distance claims).
Then he bounded up two flights of stairs at the Bondi surf club.
Before I go on, I acknowledge that I don’t know a damned thing about multi-day running, so I could be completely off base here. I did the most surface-level digging on Strava (below) and some of the runs look suspicious to me – Oct 9 100km/62 miles at 5:25/km or 8:42/mile. That was on day 39 of the run and in some of the hillier parts of the entire run.
Also, and I’m not a Strava user, it appears that not all runs have been uploaded.
Finally, before I look like too much of a jerk if this guy is legit, he started running during the Covid lockdowns and completed 50 marathons in 50 days in 2020. Another whiff of Robert Young.
So, Let’s Run sleuths, is this guy legit?