The Farmer Who Ran to Melbourne

The runners gathered at a shopping centre in Sydney in April 1983. They were some of the finest long-distance athletes in Australia, lean and serious, in the best running shoes and kit that money could buy. Ahead of them was a race to Melbourne: about 875 kilometres, along highways and over hills, day and night.

Then an older man walked up and collected a race number. He was sixty-one. He was thin and weathered, and, in the way the story is usually told, he was wearing overalls and work boots.

Some people thought he was a spectator who had wandered into the wrong place. Some thought it was a joke. His name was Cliff Young.

The farmer from Beech Forest

Cliff Young grew up on a farm at Beech Forest, in the cool, hilly Otway Ranges of Victoria. He grew potatoes and kept sheep, and he had lived simply all his life.

When reporters asked him how a man of his age expected to run all the way to Melbourne, he explained that he had grown up on a large farm with no horses and no tractors to round up the sheep. When a storm was coming, he would go out on foot to bring them in, and sometimes that took two or three days of running across the hills.

He did not say it to boast. To him, it was simply how farm life had been.

The shuffle

When the race began, the young athletes set off at a strong pace. Cliff fell behind almost at once.

He did not run like them. He moved in a strange, low, shuffling jog, his feet barely leaving the ground, his arms loose. It looked awkward. People watching on television, and some of the reporters, wondered how long he would last.

The plan for most runners in an ultramarathon of this kind was to run for about eighteen hours each day and then sleep for about six. On the first evening, the leaders stopped to rest.

Cliff did not.

Through the night

He kept shuffling through the night, with a small support team in a car beside him. It is often said that nobody had told him that runners were supposed to sleep. Whether or not that is true, he took only very short breaks, a few hours at most, and kept moving while others slept.

Each morning the leaders woke to find that the old farmer was closer than before. Then he passed them.

Across the country, people began to follow the race on the news. Crowds gathered by the roadside to watch him go by. The strange shuffle, which had looked so slow, turned out to use very little energy. It was a pace he could keep for days.

Melbourne

Cliff Young reached Melbourne in five days, fifteen hours and four minutes. He had won the race, many hours ahead of the next runner, and had beaten the younger athletes by a huge margin.

He became a national hero almost overnight. A prize of ten thousand dollars went to the winner. According to many reports, Cliff said he had not known there was any prize money, and he shared it among the other runners who had finished, because they had worked just as hard as he had.

What he left behind

In the years that followed, other ultramarathon runners copied his low, economical style of running, which became known as the "Young shuffle". Runners also learned from his example that, in very long races, they did not need to stop for so long every night. The race records fell again and again.

Cliff kept running into his old age and stayed the same modest farmer. He died in 2003, aged eighty-one.

People still tell his story because it turns our ideas upside down. The man everyone thought was too old, too poorly dressed and too slow was the one who simply kept going.

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The records of the Sydney to Melbourne Ultramarathon are kept by the Australian Ultra Runners' Association. Cliff Young's race and his life were widely reported by the ABC and Australian newspapers, including in the obituaries published when he died in 2003.