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Turtle vs Rabbits
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More Articles By Hemanth Bhaskaran
“One chance is all you need” - Jesse Owens, Olympic gold
medal winner.
By Hemanth
Bhaskaran: We all know the story of the Turtle & the Rabbit. Rabbit once boasted
of his speed before other animals and challenged them for a race. The Rabbit
quietly accepted the challenge. The race was fixed and a start was made. The
Rabbit was far ahead, lay down for a nap, by the time the rabbit woke up the
turtle had reached the winning post, the rest is history.
Here is the
story of a person was achieved the unthinkable.
His name
was Cliff Young. The whole of Australia thought that he was a crazy man. Most
feared that he would die trying. But this humble old man proved everyone wrong.
Every year
Australia hosts an 875km endurance Race from Sydney to Melbourne. It is
considered to be the world longest and toughest marathon. The participants are
world class athletes who train specially for the event. Backed by big names like
Nike and Adidas, these athletes are mostly young men and women with the most
expensive and best sponsored outfits and shoes.
In 1983, on
the day of the race, a guy named Cliff Young showed up. Initially everyone
thought that he was there to watch the event.
As Cliff
walked up to the table to take his number, it was obvious that he was going to
run. He was going to join a group of 150 world class athletes and the surprising
fact was his only trainer was his 81 year old mother.
Everybody
thought that it was a crazy publicity stunt. The reports asked “who are you, and
where do you come from”. He said that “I m Cliff Young and I’m from Melbourne”.
They asked”
Are you really going to run in the race? Cliff said” Yes”,
Got any backers? He said “No”.
Then you
can’t run. “Ya, I can”, See, I grew up on a farm where we couldn’t afford horses
or 4 wheel drives. Whenever storms would roll in, I would have to go out and
round the sheep. We had 2000 sheep. Sometimes I would have to run those sheep
for two or three days. It took a long time, but I would catch them all.
When the
marathon started, Cliff Young didn’t even run correctly. All over Australia,
people who watched the live telecast kept on praying, that someone would stop
this crazy man from running. They believed that he will die even before getting
halfway across Sydney.
Every
professional athlete knew that it takes 7 days to finish the race, and to
complete, you would need to run 18 hours and sleep 6 hours. The thing is old
Cliff Young didn’t know that.
When the
morning news was aired, there was another big surprise. Cliff Young was still in
the race and had jogged the entire night.Cliff did not stop after the first day.
Although he was far behind the world class athletes, he kept on running.
He kept
running. Every night he got just a bit closer to the leading pack. By the last
night he passed all the world class atheletes.By the last day he was in front of
them.
Not only he won the first place without dying, he broke the race record by
9hours.
He became a
national hero. The nation fell in love with the 61 year old farmer.
He said
when running through out the race, he imagined that he was chasing the sheep to
outrun the storm.
Cliff
refused to take the prize and divided into other 5 runners.
Cliff was a
humble average man who became a national sensation. Later he ran to raise money
for homeless children. He died at the age of 81.
Now, for
Sydney to Melbourne race, almost nobody sleeps. To win that race you have to run
like Cliff Young did.
What is the
teaching from this humble mans story. It the courage or determination.
That s left
to the readers.
“To be or
not to be that is the question”. – Shakespeare.
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