His tactics are simple. Like the tortoise who beat the hare, he avoided burning himself out and just kept going.

When Young talked about entering the race he was surrounded by professionals armed with stop watches, diet charts, maps and schedules, and thought he had no chance of winning.

So he told Mr Ted Hutchinson, the Victorian manager of Westfield Ltd and initiator of the event, that he was going to “toss all this out of the window” and just run.

So he did - for 875 kilometres.

When his opponents stopped for a sleep, Young just ran.

His longest break was at Albury where he caught “a couple of hours’ snooze” on Saturday night, but from 2 am Sunday, he just ran all the way to Melbourne and a $10,000 purse.

He suffers from skin cancer, so instead of shorts, he wore long plastic trousers with holes punched in them for ventilation.

Cold potatoes, oatmeal and honey were his diet, and he drank a potion based on pumpkin juice.

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While the professionals displayed the styles they had worked on for years, Young shuffled along in front of them, arms hanging limply. His training consisted of chasing cows around the paddocks at home, wearing the heaviest gumboots he could find.

He comes from a long-lived family: his grandmother lived to 101, his 89-year-old mother was in Melbourne yesterday to meet him, but the race organisers had her “stashed in a quiet motel to keep the press away from her - she’s an old woman, you know.”