Guitar Gear Forum

Axe wrote:He covered 76 kilometers (47 miles) by swimming, 3,600 kilometers (2,236 miles) on a bike and 844 kilometers (524 miles) in his running shoes.

Cliff Young was a toothless 61 year-old potato farmer from Beech Forest, Victoria, who'd lived in a one-room bark hut with six brothers and sisters during the Great Depression and showed up to the starting line of the race in overalls and rain boots. The assembled media took one look at him, shoved a microphone in his face, and asked him what it was going to be like when he keeled over and died of a massive heart attack a hundred and fifty meters in to the 875-kilometer race.

He told them, "I grew up on a farm where we couldn’t afford horses or four wheel drives… whenever the storms would roll in, I’d have to go out and round up the sheep. We had 2,000 head, and we have 2,000 acres. Sometimes I would have to run those sheep for two or three days. It took a long time, but I’d catch them. I believe I can run this race; it’s only two more days. Five days. I’ve run sheep for three."

Ok, whatever, old man, good luck with that.

The pack traveled dozens of miles in the first day alone, pounding their pavement with the ergonomic soles of their cross-trainers while this old geezer shuffled along like a dumbass in his Wellington gumboots, his pace nowhere near that of the elite ultramarathoners who by this point were tens of miles down the road away from him.

Then night came. Exhausted from 17 hours of pushing their bodies to the limit, the racers all made camp by the side of the road and went to sleep.

All of them, that is, except Cliff Young.

You see, it turned out that when Cliff Young said he chased sheeps around his farm for three days, he meant he'd single-handedly manually herded a flock of frightened ruminants across 2,000 acres of farmland for three days straight without stopping or sleeping.

He'd broken the all-time record for the Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultra Marathon. By two days. When he got the check for ten thousand dollars, he told the organizers he wasn't actually aware there was a prize for winning. Then he said he felt bad that he should get the prize money when everyone else worked just as hard as him, so he divided the ten grand equally among all the participants in the race.

In 1997 he tried to circumnavigate Australia to raise money for disadvantaged homeless orphans, but the 76 year-old had to drop out after just 6250 kilometers (3,800 miles, or roughly the distance from Key West, FL to Whistler, BC) when his only crew member (a trainer who, by the way, was making this trip in a car) passed out from illness.