Motivational Mondays: The Ageless Runner!

Are you ready for  some Monday Motivation? I've got a great one for you. The task of running a marathon is an incredible task regardless of who does and and how its done but imagine being older than 60 and running a marathon. Now imagine being older that 70? or 80? You get the idea! I'm going tell you the story of a runner than ran and finished a marathon and the incredible age of 101. Yes that is not a typo he was 101 years old and ran 26.2 miles. The name of our ageless runner is Fauja Singh and lives in the UK and has created quite a name for himself. He was even featured in an ad campaign for Adidas along side sports greats like  David Beckham and Muhammad Ali. In the UK he holds the records for the 200 M 400 M 800 M 3000 M for his age group and to make it even more impressive he broke all these records within less than 2 hours total on the same day! He then went after the world records at a meet in Toronto Canada, The Ontario Master Invitational Meet. He ran evens from the 100 M to the 5,000 M races all in the same day and broke 5 world records! He was 100 years old at the time and even ran faster than the 95 year old records. 

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​Now to make this even more incredible just 3 days later on October 16 2011 he attempted to be the very first over 100 year old to run a full marathon. He ran his heart out and ran it in 8:11:06 for the full 26.2! The sad part was that Guinness World Records refused to publish his feat as there are no official birth records were kept in India until well after 1911 when he was born but since then he has been able to produce both a record written in Urdu and a letter from ... get this Queen Elizabeth II congratulating him on this 100th birthday that year. In that same year Sign became the oldest man featured in a PETA campaign as he himself is vegetarian. To top it off he carried the Olympic torch in 2012  and in 2012 he also ran his last marathon at the age of 101. He has since retired from any competitive running but has stated several times that he will run for pleasure and charity as much as he can. Do to this and the many efforts for charity he has worked on he was awarded the British Empire Medal in 2015 for his services to sport and charity. To Fauju we salute you for all you did for our sport and for the motivation you bring us today!

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