Nedd Brockmann's mum Kylie watched him run across Australia. For 47 days, she was terrified.

At 23, Nedd Brockmann became the fastest Australian to ever run across the length of the country, averaging nearly 100 kilometres a day while raising money for charity. In an edited extract from Nedd's new book, Fire Up!, his mum Kylie Brockmann shares exactly what it was like watching her boy attempt such a gruelling feat. 

Nedd was determined from an early age.

When he was just 14 months old, I remember trying to feed him in the high chair, but every time I tried to get the spoon into his mouth, he wouldn't accept it.

It turned into a bit of a stand-off and I started getting really frustrated, so I took a moment to compose myself and went to get a cloth to wipe his face. When I turned back around, Nedd was holding the spoon perfectly and feeding himself.

From a young age, he showed that sort of determination to do things on his own.

As a boy, Nedd was always very intense. Around Year 7, he'd started rowing and had been sent home from school for the Christmas holidays with a strength program to follow that involved doing push-ups.

One day, I remember watching him do them and I saw that, like most kids, he wasn't performing the full range of his push-ups and was just bouncing up and down with a minimal bend of the elbows.

I pointed that out and told Nedd that to build up the strength to do a push-up with proper form, he should start by putting his knees down. That was probably quite demoralising for him, but once he understood what I was getting at, he took it on board and just kept practising and practising.

By the time Nedd went back to school, he could do quite a few push-ups on his toes, but he wasn't satisfied with that. He vowed he was going to do 100 push-ups every single day until he could do them with ease. And that is exactly what he did.

Watch: Man Running From Perth To Sydney For Charity Arriving In Bondi. Post continues below.

As a mum, the number-one value I wanted to instill in my kids was resilience. I wanted them to be able to deal with everything that life was going to throw at them. Part of that desire came from the fact that I lost my own mum when I was 26.

Experiencing that made me realise it was also possible that my kids could lose me at any point because, ultimately, nobody knows when you're going to die. But if something did ever happen to me, I didn't want my kids to fall apart without me. I wanted them to be strong, resilient, capable, contributing members of society — that was absolutely my mission.

Everybody's going to face crap in their life, none of us can avoid that. But I wanted my kids to develop the confidence they could do things on their own and I also wanted to nurture their relationships between them so they knew that they always had each other.

My kids were actually given a magical childhood to build resilience because they grew up on this massive farm. And I liked them to be outside playing away from me because I was very aware that I'm one of those people who always see the worst case scenario and I didn't want to be a parent who was always like 'Don't do this! Be careful of that!' Basically, I didn't want to make my children become fearful.

In the holidays, if they were outside all day and just came home for lunch, then I was happy. And that is exactly how they lived.

When Nedd was about 11, he got a motorbike. One day I remember watching him from the kitchen window when he had an accident. He was riding along when the front tyre hit some wire on the ground and the bike collapsed sideways, throwing Nedd into the dirt.

When I saw the fall wasn't too bad, I forced myself to resist the urge to rush out and comfort him. Instead, I thought I'd let him see how he'd manage on his own. After a minute, Nedd picked himself up and kicked the bike. I assumed he'd run straight into the kitchen yelling and screaming about this bloody bike.

But instead he disappeared for 10 minutes and when he returned, I saw he'd brought a pair of wire cutters with him. He cut away the wire that had locked up the wheel of his bike then he pushed and pushed until he'd got the bike upright. By letting Nedd figure that out and find the solution himself, I was trying to help him learn that he was capable of looking after himself.

After leaving school, Nedd came back and worked on the farm with his dad Ian. During that time, I think he gained an enormous amount of respect for his father. He saw how hard Ian worked and how much he'd sacrificed for his family.

Before that, Nedd might not have fully appreciated what his father did, because seeing his dad work long, long hours day in, day out without ever whingeing or carrying on, well, that was all Nedd and his siblings had ever known. But that year of working alongside his father enabled Nedd to truly recognise the extent of his dad's work ethic. He saw close-up how his father always showed up and was willing to work his fingers to the bone.

Did I ever have doubts about some of the mad things that Nedd set out to do? Of course I did, because I couldn't imagine ever doing them myself either physically or mentally. But I'd also learned that if I played the 'cautious Kathy' and said, 'Oh, do you really think you can? Do you really think you should?'. Those doubts were not what he wanted from me as his mum.

By voicing my doubts, it was almost like I instilled them into him. So I learned very early on that if Nedd said to me, 'I'm going to do this', what he really wanted to hear from me was, 'OK Nedd, how can I help you? What do you need from me?'

The year after he left school, for example, one day Nedd decided he was going to run 60 kilometres in five hours to our local Woolworths. Towards the end, I drove over to where he was running to bring him a drink and started following him in the car.

Suddenly, I remember him gesturing that he was totally spent. He was at around the 55-kilometre mark and he was so dehydrated, he told me, that his wee was thick like honey.

'I'm done,' he said.

'OK, but are you really sure?' I replied. 'There's only five kilometres to go.'

When he heard me say that, Nedd just shrugged and decided to keep going. As his mum, I just knew that was what he wanted from me — to gently encourage him on. That's what he expects of me. But it's also hard for me to step up like that when I see my child is suffering.

Watching Nedd run across Australia – I came in to join him on Day three after my daughter's 21st birthday — was both the most horrendous and the most fulfilling thing I've ever done. Every day my stomach was wound up like a tight spring. Why was it so horrendous? No parent wants to see their child go through so much pain and physical punishment.

There were days when I saw Nedd unable to stop shivering and barely able to walk. I cried a lot, but I made sure that I rarely cried in front of Nedd.

What scared me so much on the run was that I was aware of Nedd's level of commitment. He was intense as a kid and, as an adult, he's even more intense. What scared me was how determined he was to finish that run.

If he broke his leg, I knew that he would've just plastered it and kept walking. And that level of commitment does become scary. Because I knew that if he had to leave that run any other way than on foot, he was going to leave in a body bag. I was genuinely scared that if Nedd didn't complete the run, he'd die trying. I knew that was potentially an outcome. So every day on the run, I was a nervous wreck.

At the very end, watching Nedd run into Bondi was just lovely. It was so incredible to see all the support and that this little person of mine was running down the road looking like a wrung-out chicken in front of thousands and thousands of people. At that moment, I could not have been happier for Nedd. But I also felt relief because finally he could stop running at last.

Edited extract from Fire Up! by Nedd Brockmann (Simon & Schuster, $34.99) out October 2. 

Feature Image: Supplied.