Traipsing downhill through sludgy mud, the cold wind stinging my cheeks as hailstones bounced off my waterproof jacket, I stared up at the steep hill in front of me and grimaced.

We were 45km in and my knee, which gave way 23km previously, was making me wince to the point I had a support bandage on and was throwing back ibuprofen and paracetamol every two hours. While walking on the flat was just about bearable, getting up hill was agony, with every step sending jolts of stabbing pain ricocheting through my knee.

And yet I couldn’t have been happier.

Because here I was walking 60km across the South Downs in memory of Matt, having smashed my fundraising target of £2,000 (it’s currently standing at £2,200) for Winston’s Wish, both of which had seemed so unobtainable back in June last year when I was still so weakened from my brother’s suicide that physical exercise was beyond me.

The run-up to the walk had been plaguing me for days. I dreamed I’d already done it, that I hadn’t raised enough money, that I’d been forced to quit not even halfway in and that I was the last person to finish in the early hours of Sunday morning, so slow was I that even the organisers had shut up shop and gone home.

As it turns out, walking 60km was physically so much easier than I had expected. In some ways, I felt Matt was there with me, urging me on with his shy smile, embarrassed to be the centre of attention and the reason I was doing the walk in the first place. Apart from my badly swollen knee, the result of falling on a rocky Sardinian mountainside five weeks ago, I woke up the following day ache-free and without so much as a blister, proving that notching up around 80km of walking every week, along with three or four sessions in the gym, has most definitely paid off.

However, emotionally, it was tough. Really tough, terrified as I was that the doctors would tell me to pull out.

“I can’t quit,” I wailed to Mario and my friend, K, who was doing the walk with me.

“There’s no way you are not doing this,” she retorted.

“It’s not a race and you are going to finish. This is far more personal for you than it is for any of us.”

Her reassuring words were what I needed to hear and so I concentrated on counting one kilometre after another. It didn’t seem possible to walk for another 37km in constant pain but I knew that I could probably manage another 1,000 metres.

So that’s what I did. And after I counted the first kilometre, I counted the next and the next and the next. I told myself that the next rest stop was only seven kilometres away and that if I had to pull out, I could pull out then.

But when I got there, I told myself to push on for yet another kilometre, reminding myself that whatever pain I was going through, my brother’s short walk to his death would have been far more torturous.

That thought made me cry even more, my salty tears intermingling with the rain that was by now pouring down but it was a revelatory moment: one that made me realise that I was stronger than I’d realised.

After that, the walk got easier and I pushed through the pain barrier, knowing that nothing was going to stop me from completing this challenge which was about so much more than raising awareness of the issues surrounding suicide and childhood bereavement.

Almost two weeks on and something momentous has shifted except I haven’t yet understood what. Every morning when I’m savouring my first black coffee of the day, I try to work out what it is exactly that has changed. I stare in the mirror, I pull silly faces and I yank my hair back, trying to spot the difference.

But there is none. Or rather, whatever shifts have taken place are invisible to the naked eye. I don’t feel elated at completing 60km in as much as it’s not the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. In the days after Matt killed himself, putting one foot in front of the other and making it through each minute and each hour was far, far tougher. The steep hills I climbed on May 11 seemed like tiny uneven bumps compared to my tumultuous journey of the last four years.

Back in January I blogged about this being my long walk home and in many ways it’s been exactly that. Walking through stunning bluebell woods and along the Amberley chalk pitts, which were used for the James Bond film A View to Kill, was transformational on so many levels.

It is not that I’ve put the past behind me – the empty chairs at Christmas, the silence on birthdays, the absence of giggly children in the house mean we’ll always be aware of the repercussions of Matt’s suicide – more that I’ve made peace with it and realise it’s time to move on.

To me, time has barely passed since March 30, 2009. Little of consequence has happened in my life because my achievements have been played out on a smaller scale. It’s only when I look around and see friends have got married and have had two children in the time that I’ve been sat in my cavernous pit of grief that I realise that the days and the weeks and the months have ticked by.

But as I slowly emerge from my metaphoric cocoon, I realise that things have changed. Vivid colours, always so important to me, have filtered back into my life, be that in the form of a vase of freshly-cut flowers in the kitchen to bright dresses and fuchsia lipstick.

I expected all sorts of things from 14 hours of walking across the South Downs, including pain in my hips and blisters on my toes, neither of which occurred. What I didn’t expect and what I found instead was Me.

And that, apart from the satisfaction of raising £2,200 for Winston’s Wish and helping to break down the taboos of suicide and childhood bereavement, is probably the biggest prize of all.

Emma Bird walked 60km across the South Downs on May 11 to raise £2,000 for Winston’s Wish. You can continue to sponsor her here