When the skinny, vegetarian bloke of few words ran around in gumboots to round up the 2,000 sheep on his parents’ 2,000 acres of rain-sogged land, Cliff Young didn’t know he was training to compete. He just knew he needed to get the stock in – on foot. In those cumbersome boots, caked with heavy mud, he would run for two or three days at a time.

He’d already lived half a century when someone told him he’d probably make a decent long-distance runner. Cliff never owned a car and loved to run everywhere, so he started competing. The experts told him he had the wrong diet, the wrong clothing and footwear, the wrong training, and the wrong running style – he did this weird shuffle where he didn’t lift his knees high. Regardless, when he was 61 he entered the 1983 Westfield Sydney to Melbourne ultra-marathon, a five-day event between 864 and 1,060 kilometres long and one of the toughest marathons in the world. The younger competitors and the media laughed at and mocked him. They reckoned ‘the old potato farmer’ might just give himself a heart attack and was just a big joke.

In a story where, as someone said, “It’s as though the milkman’s horse won the Melbourne Cup,” Cliffy won that race, leaving the hot favourite 53km behind him. He cut almost two days off the record, running the distance in five days and fourteen and a half hours, on about twelve hours of sleep, not much to eat, and with a dislocated shoulder. Cliffy kept $3,000 of the $10,000 prize money and shared the rest with the other runners. (Apparently, he didn’t even know there was a prize!)

Australia went wild, and the underestimated, gentle, and trusting bushman whose feet were unrecognisably blistered and whose toenails were mostly hanging off, became an immediate sensation. The spotlight of fame shone brightly on him, but the unlikely hero just wanted to get back to the farm. The ‘Cliffy Young Shuffle’ would transform marathon running, adopted as the best technique to use to conserve energy.

Cliff Young (1922-2003)

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