The first 20 miles of a marathon are not difficult, Fauja Singh once said. When it came to the last six miles, however, “I run while talking to God.”
The fact that he was attempting the distance at all might seem, to some, proof of divine assistance. Singh was 89 when he first took up distance running, having stumbled across a TV snippet of people running a marathon, and decided to give it a go. By his mid-90s he was a marathon veteran, a record holder for his age group and even a poster model for Adidas; aged 101 – or at least so he believed, since he never had a birth certificate – he became the oldest person ever to run the distance.
