Running Through Grief: The Unseen Journey of Fauja Singh
By eight in the evening, the Toronto waterfront had mostly packed up and gone home. Barriers were coming off the road. Winners had showered, eaten, said their piece to the cameras and left. Out on the course, in the thin October dark, a hundred-year-old man in a yellow turban was still going.
He crossed the line at eight hours, eleven minutes and six seconds, with a small group of runners a few steps behind him who had clearly decided nobody was overtaking that man today. He was the first centenarian on record to finish a marathon. That was October 2011. His name was Fauja Singh.
The poster version of this story is about age. Look what a hundred-year-old can do, and so on. The real story sits underneath it, and it is much sadder and much more useful.
Two losses, two years apart
Singh was a farmer in Punjab, born in 1911, one of those men whose whole life had been the same few fields. His wife, Gian Kaur, died in the early nineties. He was 81 and suddenly rattling around a house that had gone quiet.
Then came the monsoon of 1994. He and his son Kuldip were out checking the fields in a storm when a loose sheet of corrugated metal came off in the wind. Kuldip was killed instantly, in front of his father.
His other children had emigrated years earlier. So there he was, in his eighties, standing in a soaked field with no wife, one fewer son and nobody in the village to come home to. His family brought him to Ilford, in east London, to live with one of his sons. His coach later said, plainly, that Singh had stopped believing his life was worth continuing.
That is the man who eventually put on running shoes. Not an athlete. Not a stoic. A widower in a cold English suburb who had run out of things to do with himself.
Why moving helps when talking doesn’t
Grief is not only a thought. It shows up as a heaviness in the chest, a body that will not sleep, an appetite that vanishes. Which is part of why sitting still with it so often fails. You are trying to solve a physical problem with words.
There is decent evidence for the other approach. A large review published in the BMJ in 2024 pooled 218 trials covering more than 14,000 people and found exercise to be a genuinely effective treatment for depression, with walking and jogging among the strongest performers, holding up alongside therapy and medication.
Therapists have a name for the mechanism, and it is less mystical than you might hope. Behavioural activation. You do the thing before you feel like doing it, and the feeling turns up afterwards, if it turns up at all. Waiting for motivation is how people spend three years in a chair.
None of which makes running a substitute for proper care, and Singh was not conducting an experiment on himself. He simply found that his legs gave the grief somewhere to go.
He did not set out to run a marathon
This part gets flattened in the retellings, and it is the part worth stealing.
Singh did not arrive in London and announce a comeback. He drifted along to Sikh community sports days, joined in a few sprints because he had always liked running as a boy, and got talking to other runners. At some point he watched a marathon on television and thought, more or less, I could have a go at that.
He was 89 when he lined up for his first London Marathon in 2000, finishing in six hours and 54 minutes and taking almost an hour off the previous best in the 90-plus bracket.
But note the actual first step. It was not a marathon. It was turning up at a field day in Ilford and jogging about with strangers. That is a small, unglamorous, entirely repeatable act, and everything else grew out of it.
Somebody was expecting him
In 1999 he was introduced to Harmander Singh, a coach in east London, through a mutual acquaintance. Harmander had a matter of weeks to get an 89-year-old ready for 26.2 miles, and did it. They went on to build the running club Sikhs in the City around him.
That relationship did more work than any training plan. The same BMJ review found that the benefits of exercise were stronger when people trained in groups and when the instructions were clear. Turning up for someone beats turning up for yourself, most weeks.
It also solved the quieter problem. Bereavement does its worst damage through isolation, through the slow shrinking of a life until there is nobody left who notices whether you got out of bed. Singh had gone from an empty village house to a coach who rang him, a club that waited for him and races with dates on them.
Eleven years is the actual headline
We love the hundredth birthday and the finish line. The bit in between is where the lesson lives.
He ran 6:54 at 89. Three years later, at 92, he clocked a personal best of 5 hours and 40 minutes in Toronto, which means he got substantially faster in his nineties. Then he got slower again, as everyone does, until the day in Toronto when eight hours was what the distance cost him.
Eight hours is slow. Beautifully, defiantly slow. He was on his feet for a working day, and the record books did not care about his pace, only that he was still moving.
Grief operates on the same timescale. You do not fix it in a fortnight. You accumulate small, boring evidence that you can still function, and eleven years later you look up and find you have built a different life on top of the old one.
Purpose is something you can install
Singh ran for charity, mostly for children’s causes, and he was candid that the fundraising was what got him out of the door, more than any love of running ever did. A cause, a date in the diary, and people who would be disappointed if he did not show.
There is a research literature on this, and it is more striking than you would expect. A study of nearly 7,000 American adults over 50, published in JAMA Network Open, found that a stronger sense of purpose was associated with a lower risk of dying during the follow-up period. That’s an association rather than proof, and the researchers were careful to say so. Still, it points somewhere.
What I take from Singh is that purpose was not something he discovered by reflecting deeply. He bolted it on from the outside. A race, a charity, a coach, a shirt with a logo on it. Meaning arrived later, as a by-product.
The grief did not go anywhere
He rarely discussed the deaths in public. When journalists pushed, his coach would explain that he preferred not to go into it, and that was that. He was not healed in the tidy sense the word usually implies.
What he said instead, near the end of his running years, was that a lot of success and happiness had come out of a tragedy. Both halves of that sentence are load-bearing. The tragedy stayed. It simply stopped being the only thing in the room.
The other thing nobody could officially certify was the running itself. Guinness never ratified the marathon record, because Singh had no birth certificate. India was not issuing them in rural Punjab in 1911. He carried a British passport giving his date of birth as the first of April that year, and a letter from the Queen when he turned 100, and none of it needed a stamp to be true. Neither did the eleven years that got him there.
He died in July 2025, aged 114, hit by a car while crossing a road near the village where he was born.
I keep coming back to a much smaller image than the finish line. An old man in Ilford, a long way from his fields, deciding on an ordinary morning to go outside and move. He had no idea it would turn into any of this. He just could not sit in the house another day.
That is the only part of the story you actually need.
