The true story of Cliff Young

This true story is about the 61-year-old Australian sheep and potato farmer Cliff Young, who won the ultramarathon from Sydney to Melbourne in 1983.

The Australian ultramarathon is known as the toughest and longest marathon in the world. Only well-trained young athletes can run the 875km for about a week, with five- hour sleep a day allowed.

When Cliff Young started the race, his equipment was a strange overall and work boots with galoshes. The other athletes wore the best training outfits and shoes and at the start Cliff was back many hundreds of meters in his heavy boots. The stadium reporter saw this start and mentioned ironically that there we saw a dreaming old man, who probably saw his rivals for the last time in this competition.

Indeed, Cliff never saw the other athletes again. While the top runners got their five-hour sleep every day, he only got one-hour and after that he kept running. At the end, Cliff Young won the ultramarathon in the record time of 5 days, 15 hours and 4 minutes.

If he had asked the experts, they would have told him that to run without sleeping enough was impossible.

However, as a farmer Cliff Young used to run for two to three days without a break to keep the sheep herd together. His best coach was his 81year old mother. She always told him, that he could win.