The Sydney to Melbourne Ultramarathon, an endurance race of 875 km, was considered the toughest in the world. It used to be a five-day race, with only the world-class athletes daring to attempt it. Most athletes who took part in this ultramarathon were under 30 years of age.

Cliff was a farmer from Australia with a dream of running a race. When he attended the race, he was 61 years old. He had no specialized sportswear. Instead, he wore galoshes overalls. When he appeared at the venue, the onlookers thought he was probably a spectator. To their surprise, Cliff picked up a race number.

Having grown up on a farm, Cliff had to go out to round up the sheep every time there was a storm, because his family could not afford horses or tractors. Two thousand sheep scattered across two thousand acres of land—it took him as long as three days of chasing the animals, but he always succeeded.

The race began, and the strong and young racers started leaving Cliff behind. The racers had a strategy. They would be running hours each for the five days of the race, and sleep for the remaining 6 hours. Nonetheless, Cliff had no such strategy! Being an amateur athlete, he was not familiar with any such game plan. So, he just ran on and on, and the next morning, when the other athletes woke up, they found that the old man had caught up with the others by jogging all night. By the final night of the race, he had surpassed the other competitors and became the champion.

The next time Cliff’ caught attention again when he was 76. He took up the challenge of running along Australia’s border, across a distance of 16,000 km with the aim of raising money for homeless children. Unfortunately, his crew member fell ill, and Cliff had to withdraw from the race, after running for 6520 km.

Cliff, a simple farmer, created a one-of-a-kind history. Instead of withering away, he started his new life, and showed the world that it’s never too late to start following the heart and pursuing dreams.

A Pittsburgh-based robotics and engineering startup recently make Moonwalkers public, a pair of battery-powered shoes that it claims can boost walk speeds by up to 250%.

At first glance, Moonwalkers look like a pair of futuristic roller-skates, but there is actually a lot more to them than that. You’re actually meant to walk with them the way you would with regular shoes or sneakers, letting the motorized wheels put a spring in your step. Powered by a state-of-the-art brushless DC motor (直流电机), this creative device is actually a platform that can be attached to a wide variety of footwear to significantly increase your walking speed up to a reported 7mph/11kph. For comparison, humans’ average walking speed ranges from 2.5 to 4 mph. The sensation of walking with the world’s fastest shoes has been compared to that of walking on a ‘moving walkway’ in an airport.

Designed by Shift Robotics, an offshoot of Carnegie Mellon University, Moonwalkers consist of a 300W brushless motor in each 4.2-lb (1.9-kg)shoe that powers eight polyurethane wheels. There is also an Al-powered gearbox that increases or decreases speed according to data regarding the wearer’s walk collected by a series of sensors. The shoes are also able to detect downhill movement to prevent accidents.

“Moonwalkers are not skates. They’re shoes. The world’s fastest shoes actually,” Xunjie Zang, founder and CEO of Shift Robotics said. “You don’t skate in them. You walk. You don’t have to learn how to use them; the shoes learn from you.” But do the world’s fastest shoes work on uneven ground, or things like stairs? We all know how tricky those are for rollerskates. Well, apparently the designers took that into consideration and with a simple gesture, the wearer can lock the wheels so that they can walk up or down stairs as they would in regular footwear.

The first batch is expected to ship in March of 2023, at a retail price of $1,399. That’s not cheap, but then again, this isn’t your average pair of shoes; it’s the world’s fastest pair of shoes.