A Helluva Lot of Potatoes

In May 1983, eleven runners lined up outside a shopping centre in Sydney for the inaugural Westfield ultramarathon to Melbourne. The route ran 875 kilometres, give or take the drive from London to Inverness, and the field was exactly what you’d expect: lean, sponsored, dressed in the latest nylon, most of them young enough to be somebody’s grandson.

And then there was Cliff.

Cliff Young was a 61-year-old potato farmer from Beech Forest in Victoria. He turned up looking as though he’d taken a wrong turn on the way to feed the livestock, in work clothes rather than racing kit, having done all his training chasing 2,000 sheep across 2,000 acres on foot, often for two or three days at a stretch, because the family couldn’t afford a horse or a tractor. That, as far as he was concerned, was the preparation.

The kind spectators were confused. The less kind ones laughed.

What nobody had told Cliff was how the race was supposed to be run. The accepted wisdom among the professionals was simple: run for around eighteen hours, then sleep for six. Everybody knew this. It was how it was done.

Cliff didn’t know it. On the first night he lay down, woke a couple of hours later in the dark, assumed it was time to get on, and got on. By the time the professionals stirred the next morning, the old man was miles up the road.

He never gave the lead back.

Rather than stopping each night, he kept shuffling through the dark while the field slept, and the gap he opened up overnight was one nobody could close. He crossed the line in Melbourne after five days, fifteen hours and four minutes, almost two days inside the previous record for the route, and more than ten hours ahead of the man in second.

Then there was the gait. Cliff didn’t run so much as shuffle: a low, flat, faintly comical shuffle that the press promptly named after him. It looked like nothing. It also turned out to be remarkably efficient, conserving the energy that the high-kneed professionals were busy burning. Sport scientists studied it afterwards. Some ultrarunners went on to copy it.

When he was handed the A$10,000 winner’s cheque, Cliff said he hadn’t known there was a prize, and gave most of it away to the other finishers on the grounds that they’d worked every bit as hard as he had. He kept three thousand. His verdict on the whole affair: “Now that’s a helluva lot of potatoes.”

There’s a reason this story has survived forty years, and it isn’t only the gumboots.

Cliff won because of three things, and all three are quietly familiar to anyone who’s watched how money actually grows over a lifetime.

The first is that he kept going while everyone else stopped.

The professionals weren’t wrong to sleep. Resting is sensible. But the race rewarded whoever stayed in it, and the lead Cliff built overnight, while the clever money was tucked up in bed, was the lead that won the thing. Investing has an uncomfortable habit of working the same way. The temptation, especially when markets lurch, is to step off the road for a while and wait for better light. It feels prudent. It usually isn’t. Returns tend to arrive in unpredictable bursts, often on the very days the nervous have stepped aside, and the person who simply stayed on the road tends to look up years later to find they’re a long way ahead. *1

Time in the market, as the cliché goes. Cliff would have called it not stopping.

The second is the shuffle.

It was unglamorous. It was mocked. It was also, on the numbers, the most efficient way of getting a tired body a very long way. The flashier the technique on display around him, the more energy it quietly cost.

The investing equivalent is cost. Every percentage point paid away in fees and friction is energy that doesn’t make it to the finish. A low-cost, broadly diversified approach, the financial version of a flat, undramatic shuffle, has a long and well-documented habit of holding its own against more elaborate strategies over time, for the unromantic reason that it wastes less on the way. None of which makes for a thrilling dinner-party story. Neither did Cliff’s shuffle. It just kept working.

The third is the kit, or rather the absence of it.

Cliff had no sponsor, no lab, no carbon-soled anything. He had a pair of legs that had spent thirty years chasing sheep and the simple intention of finishing what he’d started. The professionals had everything he didn’t, and it didn’t save them.

This is the part people find hardest to believe, because we’re trained to assume the sophisticated thing must be the better thing. In investing, the sophisticated thing is often just the more expensive thing wearing better clothes. The boring fundamentals (spend less than you earn, invest the difference, stay diversified, leave it alone, keep going) are unfashionable precisely because they’re available to everyone and need no special equipment. They’re the gumboots of personal finance. They also tend to get you there.

A few honest qualifications, because Cliff would have wanted them. Markets aren’t a single race with a single finish line, your circumstances are your own, and capital really can be lost as well as gained. Past performance, as every document we’re obliged to footnote will remind you, is no guide to the future. The point of the analogy isn’t that investing is easy. It’s that the edge rarely sits where the expensive kit is.

Cliff ran the race again in later years and never won it again. He didn’t seem to mind. He’d already made the point that mattered, which is that you don’t always need the best equipment in the field. Sometimes you just need to start, ignore the people telling you how it’s supposed to be done, and keep shuffling through the night.

We think about that more than we probably should, advising clients from our corner of Hook, and across Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire, Sussex and Kent. The genuinely good financial decisions we see are rarely clever. They’re made early, kept cheap, and left alone long enough to do their work.

A helluva lot of potatoes, in the end, tends to come from staying on the road.

*1: At an average of 6.5 km/h, Cliff’s winning pace was a brisk walk. The annoying lesson is that you don’t even have to be fast. You have to not stop.