Others who saw Percy in those last few weeks guessed the grog might have finally got to him – the slurred words, the frozen face, the glass in hand as he wandered around the yard. Nancy, Percy’s wife, would come to understand the sadness of this now – that perhaps it was only the small amount of nutrients in the spirit wine he sipped that kept him alive as long as he was. Nothing much else could get past his paralysed neck. She still blames herself for not realising something was seriously wrong when Percy started eating ice-cream. Percy never ate ice-cream. That was mush. Made of milk. Milk was for babies.

A clipboard travelled between bed, desk and his chair in those last weeks. On notepaper he unflinchingly recorded the details of his degeneration: the wasting muscles, the nausea of uncleared phlegm choking his lungs, the difficulty in swallowing. In the next sentence, he would etch out his ambitions for a future lecturing and demonstrating in America, escaping the rejection he felt in his own country. These diary notes, timed and dated, are like the last fingernail scores disappearing over the edge of an abyss.

Nancy finally convinced him to see a doctor, something he hadn’t done for 36 years, and the local GP booked him in for an examination at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne. After a battery of tests, it was determined that he was suffering from motor neurone disease. Neither Percy nor Nancy had ever heard of it. After a lifetime rewiring the lives of thousands of others, Percy’s own system was closing down – a cruelly ironic fate for this captivating orator, champion of “living” foods and superb physical specimen. The condition, already too advanced for the doctors to treat, centred on his throat – hence the struggle to speak, the inability to swallow.

It was a solemn drive home. Nancy took a detour via his old stamping grounds – past Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens, where he’d led packs of young men running thousands of miles back in the 1940s and ’50s, pioneering future fitness booms. Past the home in Domain Road, South Yarra, which once carried the famous bronze plaque proclaiming him “Percy Wells Cerutty – Conditioner of Men”, drawing athletes and acolytes from around the world like a magnet. Down through Chapel Street in working class Prahran, his birthplace. Then on to the waterfront in St Kilda, where they parked and took in the vista across Port Phillip Bay, with Portsea in the distance, a smudge on the horizon. Nancy bought them fish and chips, always a favourite, and Percy ate what few morsels he could from the paper before settling for a cup of tea. They were soon headed for home, following the arc of the Bay to the last outpost of civilisation on the Mornington Peninsula.

It was a trip they’d made a thousand times, and a trip thousands more had traced to their property in the sandhills to hear Percy’s ideas, experience the Cerutty diet, lift weights and run. It was “Ceres” on the front gate, “The International Athletics Centre” on the letterhead: a retreat built by the man himself and those who stayed there piece by piece from old packing cases and lumber retrieved from the beach. Percy’s study, encased behind glass on a second storey, overlooked gardens, ponds, paving, trellises, seats, sundials and tracks leading off in all directions through the dunes. But where once the spirited exertions and conviviality of dozens of athletes had echoed around its grounds, all drawn to the charismatic Cerutty, now it lay all but deserted.

Nancy took one last detour, turning into Backbeach Road and heading for the carpark lookout with its vast view up and down this ancient, weathered stretch of coast. It seemed like some days you could see clear across Bass Strait to Tasmania one way, then turn back over your shoulder to drink in Port Phillip Bay behind you stretched out like an open oyster, the light playing all sorts of tricks through the fleshy clouds and across its surface. For 30 years, when he wasn’t striding the globe and its most fantastic arenas, this strip of land and its waters were Percy’s retreat and sanctuary. This was his favourite view. He drank in one last long gaze, let out a sigh, and then turned to nod to Nancy that he was ready. Once home, she helped him into bed. He wouldn’t get up again under his own speed.

Nancy didn’t leave his bedside. Percy’s diary ceased. Six days later he slipped off. 

The local undertaker said it was the smallest adult corpse he’d ever put into a box, under 35kg. Percy was buried as he wished, out underneath the rabbits, snakes and ants in the sand-dune cemetery at the neighbouring town of Sorrento. Appropriately, it was one of those occasional funereal days that sweep in from the ocean and swathe this stretch of coastline in grey bandages. Hundreds turned up – most of them the old Cerutty gang, with hearts full of fond memories for the man who’d altered the course of their lives. A fine mist of rain made the grassy slope of the cemetery slippery for the pallbearers. “Just like the old bugger to still have us struggling up bloody sandhills,” Stacey murmured as they lugged the coffin. 

Some who knew him stayed away from the funeral. Percy’s extremism outraged and offended a few thousand more. Numerous relationships in his life ended bitterly. This was the man in the title of the one biography of his life, Mr Controversial, written at the height of his international fame in the early 1960s. At best, the book provided a tantalising glimpse of the man, adding to his mystique rather than analysing it. Written with Cerutty’s collusion, it was aimed at an international market of athletics aspirants whom Percy foresaw beating a path to his door. He was the subject of hundreds of articles, but each tended to follow the same tracks, their authors enthralled by his persona and antics. Percy fostered this coverage. He had six books published of his own, mostly aimed at the athlete, and hundreds of articles and poems in journals and newspapers on athletics, health, success, religion. But there was no autobiography. “Few know the real Cerutty,” he wrote.

A fuller picture of the man is revealed in the elegant flourishes of his fountain pen in his unpublished diaries, poetry, essays and notes, written on everything from the backs of envelopes to How-To-Vote cards, and bounds off the reams of paper fed through his typewriter in letters. After his death in 1975, this body of work was entombed in storage at the behest of his widow, Nancy, as she waited for the waves he generated to settle. A generation after his death, his private writings are now unearthed. 

Through his crashing typewriter, Cerutty sought to not only inspire and enthuse, but to liberate humankind. He didn’t just live the healthy life he advocated, turning himself into one of the most extraordinarily fit men for his age on the planet for the last 30 years of his life. He was also a teacher, scientist, philosopher and pioneering motivator, obsessed with the most sensitive issues of social policy, the most fundamental questions of existence and its possibilities, and the biggest taboos conceivable. 

His own life was his greatest experiment. In the athletics arenas of the world he was a common, if notorious, sight from 1952 to 1968, attending each Olympic Games during those years – first as coach, later as journalist and lecturer. In Helsinki in 1952, as an aspiring professional in an era of ultra-amateurism, he co-ordinated a posse of Australian distance men (Landy, Macmillan, Perry) on a trip that turned out an abject failure. Just eight years later, in Rome in 1960, he took centre stage as the greatest middle-distance runner the world had seen, Herb Elliott, won in fabulous style. Typically, just as Elliott crossed the line, Cerutty was being wrestled away from the arena by police.

Until its attainment in 1954, the first sub four-minute mile run was a race between nations, like the parallel quests to conquer Everest and break the sound barrier. While the axis of the athletics world ran between poles in Europe and the USA, Cerutty sought to tip it askew, producing a brace of world-class runners from the underside of the planet. His first great protégé, John Landy, would miss the mark by a mere seven weeks. Herb Elliott would subsequently smoke the record book. 

Elliott was Cerutty’s greatest protégé, the embodiment of his teachings. He’d arrived at his camp a raw 18-year-old, embraced his theories, and retired four years later undefeated over the mile or its metric near-equivalent, with an Olympic gold medal around his neck and his name beside both world records. He gave full credit for his achievement to Cerutty’s methods: this was a runner who didn’t so much redefine the spirit of sport as its spirituality. 

Yet the transformation Percy brought about in his own life was no less spectacular. At the age of 44, he had raised his body from what doctors predicted was his death bed, and through a program of violent physical exertion, diet of natural foods, alternative theories of medicine and forensic examination of his inner life, sculpted it into an organism capable of sublime physical expression. Cerutty became a phenomenon. In the grey, conformist Australia of the 1950s and ’60s, when his fame was at its zenith, his outrageous exhibitionism and razor tongue were a complete anomaly. On his numerous international tours he was feted and embraced as an enigmatic innovator. If life on Earth had evolved along the Darwinist principle of “survival of the fittest”, then Percy’s relentless competitive streak deemed that he be the fittest. Many others have pioneered paths in search of meaning; Cerutty blazed his own trail with stopwatch in hand.

Few can truthfully say they ever caught up with Percy Cerutty in life. Certainly, convention, propriety, conformity never came close. “Ahead of his time” say those who remember him. Though he is renowned as the extrovert coach of a string of champions, and mentor to thousands of athletes, the sport of track and field – indeed sport itself – was merely the vehicle for proving the substance of his theories. He saw a world growing fat, lazy, unhealthy and uninspired. Men were docile, soft, emasculated by urban life, killed by work, bleached of emotion and passion. In a conservative, insular era, Cerutty viewed the world through pantheistic, holistic, humanistic eyes. For men to flourish and find satisfaction in their lives, it was their responsibility to respect their bodies and seek to perfect them. In this way, they might discover their true “nature.”

Cerutty saw himself as picking up where the Ancient Greeks had left off: sporting competition served as a distraction from war, a generator of drama and myth, a creator of champions, a test of manliness. But what counted most was effort. Violent physical exercise was vital to the human organism. Cerutty recognised and embraced an incontestable law of Nature that strength in a living creature – strength to survive, protect and prevail – was built through stress. As such, ways had to be found to embrace stress as an essential part of life. “There is no gain without pain,” he wrote on paper and pinned to the wall above the desk in his study – decades before a contraction of those words became the slogan of a generation.  “Only the fit are fearless” would be the catchcry of his latter books, and he was certainly both. Aspects of his “Stotan” philosophy, as he branded it, can be recognised across the spectrum of cultures and religions, but he chose to anchor it in ancient Greece, with himself as its Socrates.

“Eccentric genius”, say the encyclopaedias and history books in their entries. Melbourne’s Age carried this quote in its obituary the day after his funeral: “Cerutty, the outspoken, was as famous as Cerutty the coach. Some thought he was a crank, too straightforward for many to accept. ‘He was ahead of his time – a sort of freak who will never be accepted for his worth by large numbers of people until years after he has passed away’.”

Ahead of his time? Perhaps the world wasn’t ready for him. In some eyes, he died a caricature of the fanatic, still railing at the world as they nailed the lid on the box – desperate for recognition, absurdly bitter at those who shunned him, alternately obsessing over and then renouncing the very success that he craved. But the people whose lives he directly affected offer a different view, and remain infected by what has been termed “the Cerutty virus.” Those who entered his orbit included a range of humanity from prime ministers to plasterers, and included the greatest athletes in history fulfilling the highest ambitions that men may dare. They reckon he was the most extraordinary man they ever met.