In 1983 a 61-year-old potato farmer named Cliff Young lined up for the Sydney to Melbourne ultramarathon, about 875 kilometers, against some of the best ultramarathon runners in the world. He wore long pants and seemed to shuffle more than run, a style he built up running around his farm, sometimes in rubber boots because of the rain. Plenty of Australians laughed at him. The runners had an understanding that they’d sleep until dawn, but on the first night his team set the alarm wrong and Cliff woke just after 2 a.m. and kept going. He finished in 5 days, 14 hours, and 4 minutes, about 50 kilometers ahead of the next runner, and became a national folk hero.
Born into slavery, young Booker T. Washington heard about Hampton Institute in Virginia and decided he would get there somehow, even though it was about 500 miles away. In 1872 he set out with almost nothing, walking and begging rides. When he reached Richmond he was out of money and slept under a sidewalk. He finally showed up at Hampton dirty and hungry, and the head teacher wasn’t sure about him. After a while she told him the recitation room needed sweeping. He swept it three times and dusted every bench, table, and desk four times. She inspected it, couldn’t find a speck of dust, and said, “I guess you will do to enter this institution.” He called that sweeping his college examination.
George Washington Carver was born into slavery near the end of the Civil War. As a baby he was stolen along with his mother, and only he was brought back, sick with whooping cough. He was frail as a boy, and a doctor said he wouldn’t live to 21. But he had a deep hunger to learn. He walked eight miles to school, worked as a cook and a laundry man to pay his way, and was turned away from one college because of his color. At one point, he wrote, he lived on “prayer beef suet and corn meal.” In a letter about his early life he summed it up simply: “I trusted to God and pressed on.” He became one of the most respected scientists and teachers in America.
Lou Gehrig played 2,130 games in a row, a streak so long that people called it unbreakable. On September 6, 1995, Baltimore’s Cal Ripken Jr. played his 2,131st straight game. When the game became official in the middle of the fifth inning, the numbers on the warehouse beyond right field flipped from 2,130 to 2,131 and Camden Yards erupted. The ovation would not stop until teammates Rafael Palmeiro and Bobby Bonilla physically pushed him out of the dugout to take a lap around the field shaking hands with fans. Ripken said he never really allowed himself to think about the streak. He just showed up and played, day after day.
