The 61-year-old won by not knowing he was supposed to sleep
He showed up in overalls and farm boots. Everyone else in the race had a strategy. He had a mistake.
In 1983, a potato farmer named Cliff Young entered the first Sydney-to-Melbourne Ultramarathon — 544 miles, run in stages over roughly a week. He was 61. He arrived in work overalls and gumboots, without his dentures, because he said they rattled when he ran. The professionals in the field, mostly in their twenties and thirties, watched him shuffle off at the start and assumed the old man would drop out by the second day.
He trailed badly on day one. That night, the other competitors did what every ultramarathon strategy said to do: stopped and slept about six hours to recover. Young intended to do the same — he just woke up at 2 a.m. by accident, hours earlier than planned, and rather than go back to sleep, he got up and kept running while the field lay still. It worked so well that he simply never stopped doing it. He ran the entire race without sleeping at all, using a loping, flat-footed shuffle he'd developed years earlier chasing sheep across his family's farm in gumboots, sometimes for two or three days at a stretch when a storm was coming.
He finished first, ten hours ahead of the runner-up, having beaten the previous course record by nearly two days. When he learned there was a $10,000 prize — he hadn't known — he split most of it among the five other finishers, on the grounds that they'd worked just as hard as he had.
The race organizers had built in a strategy: sleep in shifts, pace yourself, respect the distance. Young beat it by simply not knowing there was one.