Fauja Singh, the Harold Stassen of road racing
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...
Did Fauja Singh just taunt India’s PM?
Fauja Singh, the world’s only 101-year-old marathoner, has said he’ll hang up his sneakers next month. At this point, some men might start organizing their ribbons and trophies, or writing notes to supporters, or staring out over a brightly lit city from a high balcony. Reflecting. Or, like Singh, they might use that last month...
Fauja Singh: don’t want to look, can’t turn away
When you’re, say, 50, it’s easy to feel like you’re dull. Uninteresting. You can feel invisible. So when you find something that puts you in high relief, that gives you an identity—especially if you excel at it and it demonstrates what a complete badass you are—you’re going to hold on to it. No. More...
Flabby old heart no impediment to wrecking knees, hips
“We always worry about marathoners who are sort of dropping dead, if you will, and having a heart attack during the marathon,” says Dr. Davinder Jassal as he explains the purpose of his recent study and, simultaneously, gives us our favorite quote of the month. Jassal (an associate professor of medicine, radiology and physiology at...
America’s toughest athlete is a vegan
Whatever you think of Bill Clinton, you have to give him this: the guy doesn’t mess around with his health. He had heart issues (a quadruple bypass followed by stent surgery); he did the research; he talked to people (because if you are a former president everyone takes your calls) and decided to go on...
Exercise might make you less fit
It’s been a painful week for exercise. First, a review of six studies of physical exercise found that 10 percent of the subjects—people who exercised regularly—actually experienced a decline on one of four common measures of heart disease (blood pressure, insulin, HDL cholesterol, and triglycerides). Seven percent scored worse on two measures. So, for reasons...
Marco Olmo is to the Alps what Caballo Blanco was to the Copper Canyon
Writing about the real and perceived risks of long-distance running for old people, we were reminded of the triumphs of Marco Olmo, the 60-year-old Italian excavator operator who won the grueling, 166-km (with 9,400 meters of climbing) Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc. Actually, he won it twice, in 2006 and 2007. He’s well known in Europe...
How dangerous is distance running for old folks?
Older runners who are in excellent shape, with years of marathons under their collective and not very long belts, can still be cut down in mid-stride by a cardiac arrest. That’s the lesson suggested by the autopsy of famed 58-year-old endurance runner Micah True (AKA Caballo Blanco), who reportedly died from an undiagnosed enlarged left...
101-year-old Fauja Singh finishes London Marathon
Fauja Singh has (again) broken the record for the oldest person to finish a marathon. The BBC reports that the 101-year-old Londoner (and proponent of ginger curry) posted a time of 7 hours and 49 minutes. That’s about a half-hour faster than his time at the 2011 Toronto Marathon, where he set the previous record...
The Boston Marathon is thundering toward you
Patriot’s Day is coming on April 15, which means the granddaddy of marathons (well, American marathons) will be run in Boston, which means we’ll see a lot of stories about granddaddies who run marathons. Older marathoners are considered feature-bait, because they are thought to be unusual. Marathon-running preteens are also unusual but also possibly a...
Saturday mash-up: March 31, 2012
Whenever there’s a pile of items that accumulate over the week and we can’t get around to individual pieces on each one, we throw them into a bin like this, which we previously called a stew and then a hash. This time we’re call it a mash-up, which seems like another food metaphor but less...
Toward a new definition of extreme sports
Two stories this week raise the issue of what we are talking about when we talk about extreme sports. Typically, the term is used to describe anything really dangerous and really unusual: physical activities pursued by a few people at the far end of the bell curve of crazy. (Base...
