07/09/2026
He Wasn’t the Fastest. He Just Kept Going.
In 1983, a 61-year-old Australian potato farmer named Cliff Young entered an 875 km ultramarathon from Sydney to Melbourne.
He arrived at the start line in overalls and work boots. The other competitors were experienced ultramarathon runners, many decades younger than him.
Nobody expected him to win.
The conventional strategy was simple: run during the day, then stop and sleep for about 5–6 hours each night.
Cliff initially followed the same plan.
On the first night, he went to sleep expecting his crew to wake him at around 5:30 a.m.
But there was a mistake.
His alarm went off at 2:30 a.m.
Instead of going back to sleep, Cliff got up and started running.
While the other runners were still sleeping, he was moving.
And he kept moving.
His running style was an unusual, slow shuffle. He wasn’t the fastest runner on the course. But his pace was sustainable, and he gradually built an enormous advantage.
There were plenty of moments when things could have gone wrong. At one point he even went about a kilometre in the wrong direction. Later, exhaustion and sleep deprivation became so severe that he was barely aware of what was happening around him.
Yet he kept going.
After 5 days, 15 hours and 4 minutes, Cliff Young crossed the finish line.
He won the race by about 10 hours and smashed the previous record by almost two days.
What fascinates me about this story isn’t simply that a 61-year-old beat much younger elite runners.
It’s the strategy.
The other runners were optimising for speed.
Cliff was, almost accidentally, optimising for continuous progress.
A faster pace doesn’t matter if you have to keep stopping.
Sometimes the person who looks slowest is actually moving forward the longest.
This applies far beyond running.
In business, learning, fitness, and life, we often admire speed — how quickly someone grows, learns, builds or achieves.
But there is another question that is just as important:
Can you keep going?
You don’t always have to be the fastest.
You just have to keep moving.
Consistency over speed. Progress over perfection.
