Nobody had heard of Cliff Young. In late 1982, his application to run in a foot race from Sydney to Melbourne turned up on Martin Noonan's desk. Noonan thought it was some kind of joke. Young was sixty-one years of age. He came from the western districts of Victoria. He was a potato farmer and still lived at home with his mother, Mary. She was eighty-nine and kept fit by cutting wood."
"Noonan was helping to organise an event for elite athletes. He was the state marketing manager for Westfield, an empire of shopping centres which made a fortune by providing places where people could be bored in comfort. Westfield was already contributing to the fitness of the nation by getting its citizens to push trolley loads of consumer goods from the checkout to the carpark. They got an extra workout when the wheels of the trolley went in four different directions at the same time."
"Noonan, a dedicated runner himself, wondered if Westfield could sponsor something in Melbourne a bit like Sydney's City to Surf, an annual race which attracts over 50,000 entrants."
"Melbourne used to call it the City to Sewer because the finishing point, Bondi Beach, had trouble in those days with effluent outflow. For various reasons, the City to Surf idea was not going to work in Melbourne. Melbourne had a city but no surf. A similar distance to the Sydney event would have taken runners from the city to the northern suburb of Fawkner, best known for its memorial park, but the City to Cemetery concept was hard to sell. This was despite the fact the City to Surf often kills at least one of its entrants, unsually somebody well on in years who has decided that by keeping fit they will live forever. The plan went on the shelf."
"... Westfield would put up a prize of $10,000 and meet the running costs for the race between Australia's two largest shopping centres, Westfield Parramatta, in Sydney's western suburbs, and Westfield Doncaster, in Melbourne's east. Before long, twelve competitors had come forward. Cliff Young was among them."
"Noonan, a serious runner, was on the Pritikin diet. Cliff Young wasn't. He told Noonan that he needed oil in his diet to keep his bones lubricated. He also said that he did most of his training running round the paddocks in gumboots."
"Young had been running seriously for only three years. Before that, he'd tried hang-gliding but found it was too dangerous. He had played football for his local team, Colac, until he was forty and was disappointed to have been retired on account of his age. When his application arrived, Noonan thought he better take Cliff out for a bit of a run to make sure he was up to the task."
"Not only was Cliff in remarkable physical condition but he was a natural wit. He had an answer to everything. He said that where he came from it rained for nine months of the year. Then the winter set in."
"A press release went out saying that one of the competitors trained in gumboots. From that moment, Young had a toehold in the public imagination. He was running against technology. At the media launch of the event, a journalist asked Cliff why he wasn't wearing gumboots today. Cliff said that he'd been given a pair of new-fangled fancy runners. They were so good, he said, that it took him 200 metres to slow down and stop."
"On 27 April 1983, the race began at a cracking pace along the road from Sydney to Melbourne. They did the first 42 kilometres, the length of a marathon, in less than three hours. Cliff took a wrong turn. He said later that he was lucky he didn't run to Darwin by mistake. Another competitor pointed him in the right direction."
I hadn't heard of Cliff Young either until I read this story in Michael McGirr's book "Bypass - The Story of a Road", a funny, quirky, ironic, witty and intelligent description of the Hume Highway which runs for 875 kilometres that Cliff Young ran between Melbourne in the southwest of Victoria and Sydney in the northeast of New South Wales.
We have another "Cliffy" living in the village who's as tough as nails. Some time ago, I asked him if he had heard of his namesake, the potato farmer from Colac. He hadn't heard of him. I don't feel so bad now.
P.S. A good friend who's better versed in such matters as I am emailed me, "Cliff Young retired to the Sunshine Coast where he was seen to be an active chaser of nubile young ladies." He died in 2003 in Beerwah on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, aged 81 - click here.
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