Fauja Singh, the baddest 101-year-old vegetarian marathoner on the planet, has maybe possibly (but not really) retired from competitive racing.
Singh, who turns 102 on April 1, finished last weekend’s Standard Chartered Hong Kong Marathon’s 10-kilometer (6.25-mile) race in 1 hour, 32 minutes, 28 seconds—half a minute faster than he ran it last year as a callow 100-year-old. For a few months leading up to the event, he told everyone who would listen that this was it, he was through with competitive running…even though he still felt pretty darn good thank you very much. No ailments to speak of, no loss of desire.
We can think of five reasons to doubt him.
First, this is not a man who gives up on anything. Ever. As ESPN’s marvelous profile points out, he has finished every race he ever started. (An astonishing detail revealed in that piece: Singh was so sickly as a toddler, he couldn’t manage anything better than a crawl until he was over four years old. And he couldn’t walk properly until he was 10. So it’s clear he keeps on trying until he gets the hang of something.)
Second, he’s tried to retire. At least once before. But he kept stopping by races, hanging around, like the retired executive who drops by just to talk to his old secretary, or the guy who fixes the elevator, or virtually anyone who ever stepped foot inside corporate headquarters.
Third, nothing he says makes you think he’s equipped to stop. He doesn’t have the heart to quit.
He’s not afraid to say that the notion of retirement is abhorrent to him: “I do not really want to hear the word ‘retire’ because I can still run and jump on a bus. It’s a (sense of) negativity that I have never experienced before.” And he can tell you why: “I fear that when I stop running, people will no longer love me. At the moment, everyone loves me… I hope nobody will forget or ignore me,” he said. “When you become old, you become like a child and you want the attention.”
Fourth, he’s said he would “love to die on the track.” You don’t say that just before you buy a new recliner. You say that when you’re lacing up your shoes. And he’s explained that he plans to maintain his 10-mile-a-day running habit. Just to stay healthy.
Finally, he’s already starting to redefine what retirement means. He makes all the noises about being sad to quit and he’ll miss it and he can imagine his future self thinking back on his career and then adds, as an aside, a by-the-way, that he’ll continue to run “for charity.” (Which he has done throughout his racing career. In fact, he was the champion fund-raiser at last year’s Hong Kong Marathon.)
There could be a problem with translation here, but if he really means he’s going to run for charity—and not just appear at races—then he’s not retiring. To our knowledge, the only way you run for charity is to run in an event, which is what he has been doing. Spectacularly.
So yes, Fauja Singh is the Harold Stassen of road racing: a man incapable of not running.
