At a glance
- A 61-year-old potato farmer won the first Sydney-to-Melbourne ultramarathon in 1983 largely by running while others slept.
- His 2am start began as an alarm mistake. The unwritten rule it broke disappeared for every runner after him.
- Questioning a rule gives a one-time edge. Test it with care, and keep the parts that were protecting you.
It is just after two in the morning on a highway south of Sydney. The other runners are asleep in their vans. There was an agreement, never written down, that everyone would rest until dawn. One man is already back on the road. He is 61, he farms potatoes, and he runs with a strange, low shuffle that barely lifts his feet.
His name was Cliff Young. The race was the first Westfield ultramarathon from Sydney to Melbourne, in April 1983. By the end of it, the rule everyone had agreed to follow would be gone.
This essay is about that rule, and about the ones in your own week that work the same way. By the end, you’ll have a simple way to spot a rule nobody actually wrote.
The rules nobody wrote down
Most of what we do each day follows rules. A few are written: laws, contracts, job descriptions. Far more are not. They are habits of a group that feel like facts.
Meetings take an hour. Email gets answered first thing. You need a free weekend to start a project. Serious runners sleep at night.
Unwritten rules are useful. They save you from deciding everything from scratch. But they carry a hidden cost. Because nobody wrote them, nobody checks them. They survive not because they work, but because everyone assumes someone else tested them.
That is the space Cliff Young ran into.
What actually happened in 1983
The race started in Parramatta on 27 April 1983 and finished in Doncaster, on the edge of Melbourne. The DUV ultramarathon results database puts the course at 864 kilometres. The memorial in his home district says 875. Either way, it was a long way to shuffle.
The field expected a few days of hard running and long nights of sleep. According to the ABC, there was a gentleman’s agreement that runners would sleep until dawn.
Young’s crew meant to wake him at 5am on the first morning. The alarm was set wrong. It was actually 2am when they got him up, “but there was no point putting him back to bed,” journalist Neil Kearney later wrote. So he kept going.
From then on, he barely slept. He did not run without any sleep at all. At Albury, one rival caught him while he had been asleep for an hour and a half. But he rested in short blocks while the others kept to the old rhythm.
The DUV results database lists him as the winner in five days, fifteen hours and four minutes. George Perdon finished second, about ten hours later. Only six men finished at all.
Twenty years later, fellow ultrarunner Ron Grant put it simply. Young won, he said, “because everyone believed they had to go to bed at night time and Cliff didn’t read the book.”
Why continuity beat speed
Young was not the fastest runner in the field. Grant said as much: “Cliff wasn’t necessarily the best runner but Cliff did things differently.”
What he had was continuity. A slow pace you can hold beats a fast pace you have to stop. His shuffle, which looked almost comic, was considered to use less energy than a longer stride. Other ultramarathon runners later adopted it, according to a newspaper tribute after his death.
There are three lessons here. None of them require you to run anywhere.
First: the advantage was in the gap, not the effort
Young did not try harder than the others. He used hours they had agreed not to use. Picture your own week. There may be a stretch of time everyone treats as off-limits, or a task everyone does in the same slow way. The gain is often there, not in grinding harder at the part everyone already works on.
Second: an accident can reveal a rule
The 2am start was a mistake. But the mistake exposed something. Nothing bad happened when he ran in the dark, so the “rule” lost its force.
You can create the same accident on purpose. Change one small thing about how a task is usually done, and watch what breaks. Often, nothing does.
Third: once a rule is broken, it’s gone for everyone
Tony Rafferty finished fifth, almost two days behind Young. He described what changed:
That was the finish of the sleep for all of us.
In later editions, runners ran through the nights too. By 1987 the course exceeded 1000 kilometres, and the leaders still ran long into the night. An edge that comes from questioning a rule does not last. It works once, then becomes the new normal.
The other side
It would be easy to turn this into “sleep is for the weak.” That is not what the story shows, and the evidence points the other way.
First, Young’s win came from an alarm mistake, not a bold theory. He adapted well to an accident. That is different from planning to go without rest.
Second, the runners who came after him were faster, and they still slept on purpose. Race director Charlie Lynn described how Yiannis Kouros, in the 1987 race, ran almost without stopping from the start, with only short breaks, and still took a planned three-hour sleep at Moe. The winning formula became speed plus planned rest, not no rest.
Third, sleep loss has real costs. In a study of 1,154 mountain ultramarathon finishers, 80% reported at least one symptom they blamed on sleep deprivation, such as hallucinations or falls. Runners who banked extra sleep before the race had fewer sleep-related falls: 12.3% against 17.3%. Another study found that only 21% of ultrarunners had a plan for managing sleep during a race.
So the lesson is narrower than the legend. Question the rule. Then test it with care, and keep the parts that were protecting you.
Try this today
Take a piece of paper and write down three “rules” from your week that nobody actually wrote. Some starting points:
- When you do your hardest work.
- How long a certain task is supposed to take.
- What you believe you need before you’re allowed to start something.
Next to each, write who decided it. If the honest answer is “no one” or “everyone,” circle it.
Pick one circled rule and break it for a single day. Not forever. One day. Answer email at noon instead of 8am. Start the project with forty minutes instead of a free weekend. Then notice what actually changed.
Cliff Young didn’t set out to beat a rule. An alarm clock did it for him, and he had the sense to keep going. You now have a way to find your own 2am: look for the rule nobody wrote, and test it once.
