In mid July, the Guardian reported the death of Fauja Singh at the age of 114, when he was hit by a car while crossing the road in his birth village of Beas Pind, near Jalandhar in Punjab.
Fauja Singh spent the first eight decades of his long life as a farmer in the small Punjabi village, where he was born in 1911, married and raised six children, but never learned to read or write. After his wife died in the early 90s, he moved to Ilford in the UK to be close to family members.
It was here, grief stricken and speaking no English, that Fauja, flicking through a TV set, stumbled across footage of the 1999 New York marathon and, at the age of 89, decided to give it a go. By his mid-90s he was a marathon veteran, a record holder for his age group and a poster model for Adidas, and at age 101 he became the oldest person ever to run the distance….though his lack of paperwork meant that his feat was never acknowledged by the Guinness Book of Records.
His remarkable story is captured in the Bollywood film, Fauja, and he is remembered in east London for the running club he founded, called ‘Sikhs in the City’! According to the Guardian article, one of his sayings was, ‘When you get old, you become young again, because you want attention.’
Read the full Guardian article here.
The picture above is from the Guardian article.