A potato farmer, Cliff Young took part in a Sydney to Melbourne ultramarathon (超级马拉松) race in1983. Coached by his mother who was 81 at the time, Cliff Young started the marathon with work shoes and work clothes.
Competing against world-class marathon runners who were backed up by big sports companies and spent hundreds of hours preparing for the race, Cliff Young's training method was just running after his sheep. He told the organizers he could run after his sheep for a few days and that he could surely compete with other runners.
The ultramarathon generally took 5 days to compete and this potato farmer's decision seemed suicidal. In fact, some tried to stop him from running the super-difficult race because they thought Cliff Young could die because of the heat and fatigue(疲劳). After all, he was 61 years old!
To cut the story short, Cliff Young managed to finish the race. While the young racers slept, he continued to race throughout the night. The young athletes left him far behind until the very last night where he finally led the marathon. Not only did Cliff Young, a 61-year-old potato farmer, survive the race, but he even managed to win the marathon and actually broke the race record by 9 hours! He even gave away his prize money to the rest of the runners after him.
After the win, he continued to run in many ultramarathon races and even set standards in the world of endurance racing. His running style, named "The Young Shuffle" is a famous running technique used by many runners in the world today.
Cliff Young showed that being old is not a problem, and being a champion doesn't mean you need to have super-human strength, just super-human will!
