Just Keep Running

Field Note: On a pattern I keep noticing

I have been carrying a few threads around this week, hoping to find what ties them together. They seem separate, but I sense a meaning waiting to be revealed.

One of them is Cliff Young. Cliff was born in February 1922. He is hardly known outside Australia now. That is a shame. His story is one of our quiet gifts.

For years, Australia ran an 875-kilometre endurance race from Sydney to Melbourne. At the time, it was the world’s toughest ultramarathon. The runners were elite. Sponsored. Youthful. They had the best shoes and the best science. The race usually took a week.

In 1983, a 61-year-old man turned up in overalls and gumboots.

Most people assumed he was there to watch.

When Cliff walked up to collect a race number, it was clear he would run. He pinned it to his work clothes and shuffled in with the world’s best athletes. Reporters gathered. Some laughed, others worried. Many thought it cruel to let him start. A few feared he might die.

When asked about his plan, Cliff said he grew up running sheep. No horses, no trucks. Just him, the weather, and the distance. Sometimes he ran for days to beat storms.

When the race started, the professionals disappeared ahead. Cliff shuffled after them, his gait wrong: ungraceful, inefficient, stubborn.

Australia watched. And worried.

Cliff didn’t know elite runners slept. He didn’t know there was a system. He kept going through the night. While others rested, he imagined sheep getting loose.

By the final stretch, Cliff Young had passed them all.

He won the race. He broke the record by nine hours.

When they handed him the prize money, he gave it all away, saying the others had it tougher. The next year, injured and slower, he ran again and finished, giving the money away once more.

He never kept much. He just kept going. And giving.

That story has been sitting alongside another news story this week.

Thirteen-year-old Austin Appelbee was off the coast of Western Australia. A family day turned wrong: wind, distance, and fear. As his mother and siblings drifted out to sea, he swam to shore. Two miles. Then a run followed.

He did not think of himself as brave. He did not think of himself as a hero. He just did what was in front of him.

He swam for hours. He prayed. He sang. He thought of his family. When he reached shore, his first thought was that they still needed saving.

Rescuers called it superhuman. Austin did not.

And finally, there is Dory.

Of all the animated fish, she quietly hums through the chaos: just keep swimming.

These are different stories on different stages. A farmer. A teenager. A cartoon fish. They all share the same stubborn thread.

They seem like witnesses, urging us not to stop, not to sit down, but to keep running the stretch in front of us.¹

It’s not about brilliance, optimisation, or knowing the rules. It’s about staying with it. One more stroke, one more step, one more night.

There is something deeply human in that. Something faithful. It is the kind of courage that does not announce itself until much later. It turns out the soul does not need a training manual. It just needs a direction.

I am still stitching. But I think that is the shape.

1. Hebrews 12