Australia’s Westfield ultramarathon had a surprise entrant in 1983: a 61-year-old potato farmer named Cliff Young. He arrived wearing overalls and gumboots and took a place among a field of 150 elite 20-somethings for the 543-mile run from Sydney to Melbourne.
Young ran with a peculiar shuffling gait that soon left him far behind the leaders, but as the race wore on he gained ground rapidly. His strategy was simple: He didn’t sleep. He had routinely rounded up sheep on his family’s 2,000-acre ranch in Victoria, where he often ran two or three days without rest, and this preternatural endurance carried him easily into first place in the Westfield race, beating the record time by nearly two days.
At the finish Young said he’d been unaware there was a $10,000 prize; he gave it away to five other runners and returned quietly to his ranch. Asked what advice he’d give to other elderly runners, he said, “No matter what you do, you have to keep moving. If you don’t wear out, you rust out.”
Sources: 1
http://www.youtube.com/user/communitychannel
Natalie Tyler Tran is a video blogger on YouTube from Sydney, Australia, using the nickname communitychannel. She is a 2nd generation Vietnamese Australian. As of June 22, 2009, she has 163 videos available on her channel (not counting videos that may have been deleted) and is 1st most subscribed of all-time in Australia, 16th most subscribed of all-time on YouTube and the 7th most subscribed Director. She is also the number 1 most subscribed for the categories of Director and Partners for Australia of all time and the 52nd most watched person on Youtube. In addition, she was the first runner up in the Miss Youtube contest created by Michael Buckley of What The Buck. Her first video was created on September 25, 2006. Tran vlogs about her daily-life situations as a university student.
Read more…
In this TED archive video from 1998, paralympic sprinter Aimee Mullins talks about her record-setting career as a runner, and about the amazing carbon-fiber prosthetic legs (then a prototype) that helped her cross the finish line.http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_on_running.html
Aimee Mullins (born 1976 in Allentown, Pennsylvania) is an American athlete, actress, and fashion model best known for her collegiate-level athletic accomplishments, despite a disability that resulted in the amputation of both of her legs.
Read more…
A 1994 honor graduate of North High School, Roxana was active in music, soccer, Key Club, and danceline. Roxana earned a double major in French and Communication in 1997 from Concordia College in Moorhead, MN. She remained active with music, soccer, and reporting for the campus television and newspaper.
In 1997, she was selected Miss North Dakota; and was a Top Ten Finalist at the Miss America competition, winning the Scholar Award. In 1999, she completed a Master’s Degree in Broadcast Journalism from Northwestern University in Chicago; and in 2000, Roxana earned a Master’s Degree in International Relations from Cambridge University in England.
Roxana has worked in video journalism and reporting for various television stations and agencies in several states and England. Since 2003, she has served as a free lance journalist representing various international organizations, including the BBC. She is presently residing in Tehran, Iran, where she reports on the Middle East; and is completing work on a Master’s Degree in Iranian Studies and International Relations.
Read more…
Elyse Luray is a member of the PBS series’ History Detectives team. After more than 10 years as an expert appraiser and consultant for Christie’s Auction House, she joined the cast of the highly successful show. Luray’s specialties include pop culture, mixed media, arms and armour, and Native American art. Luray is also a regular contributor on vintage arts and pop culture for Antique Trader magazine. She is a graduate of Tulane University.
Read more…
35 year old Dr. Mainzer is a Research Scientist at JPL.
After obtaining her B.S. in physics at Stanford, she took a year off after graduation to work at Lockheed Martin, where she worked on the Spitzer Space Telescope. She was the Principal Investigator of a cryogenic camera called the Pointing Calibration and Reference Sensor (PCRS), which serves as the fine guidance sensor for Spitzer. She worked on Spitzer during graduate school in astronomy at Caltech.
After receiving her M.S. at Caltech, she finished her Ph.D. at UCLA with Dr. Ian McLean. For her thesis, she built the First Light Camera for SOFIA (FLITECAM) and observed brown dwarfs with it. She received her Ph.D. in 2003 just before Spitzer’s launch. The PCRS was the first camera to see light on Spitzer and has been operating since 2003.
She joined the WISE team and JPL in 2003. As the WISE Deputy Project Scientist, she works to ensure that WISE will meet its science requirements. She is also the principal investigator of a project to enhance WISE’s ability to find new asteroids.
Jade Raymond was born in Montreal Canada. She attended the Marianopolis private college in Downtown Montreal and after spending one whole summer playing video games it became pretty clear for her that she had not only to play them, but to make them.
As a teenager, she did night shifts working as a hospital switchboard operator. Part of her job involved calling “Code-Green” or “Code-Red” over the loud speaker and paging hospital staff when there were emergencies.
She later studied computer science at the McGill University in Montreal, and after graduating college with a degree in, Jade’s first job was programming games at Sony. While at Sony, she founded the first Research and Development group within Sony Online. Her team was responsible for leveraging Sony IP across multiple platforms and ultimately building Sony Online’s most trafficked offerings: the entire suite of Jeopardy games played by over 3,000 simultaneous users on a daily basis.
With a specialty in creating and designing online games, Jade began work at EA as a producer and went on to be the Producer behind one of EA’s most popular online games to date, The Sims Online. She was directly responsible for all design and implementation of online game features and content for EA’s highest revenue generating wholly owned property.
Read more…