The Movie
The doctors once told me I had arthritis in my joints and to take it easy, so I said ‘I’ll fix that up, I’ll run it out.’ So I kept running and it disappeared ... It is like rust that gets into a vehicle. Well, I think it was like rust in me. I reckon you have to keep your joints moving. Absolutely. No matter what you do, you have to keep moving. If you don’t wear out, you rust out, and you rust out quicker than you wear out."
Never heard of him? That’s okay. Almost a generation has passed since Cliff Young died back in 2003 at the age of eighty-one at his home in Beerwah in Queensland. It was what he did twenty years earlier, at the comparably younger age of 61, that stunned the running world.
Nobody knew who he was when he showed up to request a participant’s bib at the inaugural running of the Sydney to Melbourne Ultramarathon in 1983, a nearly 544-mile, week-long race designed to test the mettle of the world’s toughest runners.
All they knew is what they could see: more than 100 other young marathoners, several of whom wore their corporate sponsors emblazoned on their running gear, ready to run the race — and one 61-year-old potato farmer wearing a cheap pair of sneakers and some old ratty pants he’d cut holes in for a kind of do-it-yourself ventilation.
He wasn’t taken seriously. The people behind the registration desk were shocked when he told them he was there to run the race, not simply watch it. Snicker though they did, they gave him a bib.
The Book
When he lined up at the starting line alongside the other runners, the reaction was the same. Some laughed, others were incredulous. And when the starting gun went off, they all left him in the dust. Young simply shuffled along at his slow pace, letting them sprint ahead.
They didn't know the training that had gone into Young's sixty-one years on his farm, where he still lived with his mother. Since he was a young boy, he had herded sheep in his overalls and gumboots, a task that might take him days to complete, he told reporters back then:
"See, I grew up on a farm where we couldn’t afford horses or tractors, and the whole time I was growing up, whenever the storms would roll in, I’d have to go out and round up the sheep. We had 2,000 sheep on 2,000 acres. Sometimes I would have to run those sheep for two or three days. It took a long time, but I’d always catch them. I believe I can run this race."
His ability to go without sleep, honed all those years on the farm, turned out to be his secret weapon.
At the time, it was accepted that runners in ultra events would run for about eighteen hours and sleep for the other six, to give themselves enough rest. But Young only needed a couple hours of sleep each night. So by the time the rest of the field had woken up each morning of the race, he was a long, long way down the road.
His competitors were sure they could catch him. But their need for sleep proved too strong to resist. By the time Young reached the finish line in first place, he wasn’t just a little ahead; he finished nearly ten hours ahead of the runner in second place.
The Documentaries
Young was as humble and magnanimous in victory as he was in life; he shared most of his $10,000 in winnings with his fellow competitors.
After the race, the man who’d lived his whole life with his mother (and was then still a virgin) married a woman nearly forty years his junior and began running more ultras, including an attempt to run the entire 8,316 miles of the Australian continent.
His marriage didn’t last, unfortunately (though Young told reporters in later years they had remained friends). But he still kept running, still competing in events into his seventies — he even set an age record in a six-day race when he was 78 years old.
And he just kept going for the joy of it, just shuffling along, slowly getting there, putting one foot in front of the other. He had almost none of the material wealth we enjoy today — he didn’t even have teeth, and had to take his dentures out when he ran, because he said they rattled too much.
But through it all, he just kept going, running as much as twenty to thirty kilometers a day in addition to working on his farm. Meanwhile, his running style has become part of the Australian language: the "Cliff Young shuffle". Born in 1922 to a poor farming family in Victoria, he passed away in 2003, leaving behind a legacy of perseverance and generosity that continues to inspire athletes and dreamers everywhere.
Dedicted to memory of
Cliff Young
Potato farmer and athlete from Beech Forest.
8 / 2/ 1922 - 2 / 11 / 2003
In 1983 aged 61 Cliff won the inaugural 875km Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultra Marathon in five days, fifteen hours and four minutes becoming a national hero.
He trained on his farm chasing cattle in gum boots and started the race wearing the unusual footwear which became part of his national image.
Cliff's peculiar style, labelled the "Cliff Young Shuffle", has since been adopted by other ultra marathon runners.
For many years Cliff was a familiar sight around the district as he trained or "shuffled" along the local roads. He went on to run more that 20,000 km over his competitive career.
Initiated by the Beech Forest Progress Association
And this being the last day of the long Australia Day weekend, I just want to add, at the risk of upsetting quite a few people, that I'm glad Captain Cook "invaded" this country 250 years ago because I love it here.
