Fauja Singh and the Quiet Marathon of Life

A farewell to a quiet runner, steadfast soul, enduring example

There are lives that shout, and lives that whisper. Fauja Singh’s life did something rarer: it spoke steadily. It didn’t demand attention. It didn’t flinch from hardship. It moved forward. And because it did, it moved others. That is the image many will hold now, in the days following his death at 114: the slim, upright figure with white beard and yellow turban, crossing marathon lines with hands raised, not in triumph, but in thanksgiving.

He died not running but walking—struck in a hit-and-run incident near his birthplace in Punjab. The detail is cruel. A man who spent the last third of his life advancing with deliberate dignity was taken by the haste of another, by a world that too often forgets to pause. The symbolism is harsh but apt: someone whose every step was measured, mindful, cut down by an act of reckless urgency. Not just criminal, but emblematic—of a time that rarely looks back, that overlooks the old for the novel, that races without seeing.

He began running seriously in his late eighties, after losing his wife and a son. It was a return to motion for someone who, as a child, could not walk until the age of five. His legs were thin, weak, and for years he could not move more than a few steps. That early frailty did not define him. Instead, it quietly prepared the ground for a story in which strength would mean something other than dominance—it would mean constancy. He had moved from India to Britain and, in the loneliness of diasporic late life, found motion. At 89 he completed his first marathon. At 100, he became the first centenarian to do so. His last major race came at 101. But long after the cameras faded, he continued to rise early, walk, pray, train, and quietly uphold the life he had reclaimed. It was not spectacle. It was rhythm.

Much will be said about age and fitness. But age was only the surface. What made Fauja Singh luminous was not his body, but his character. He lived with the kind of integrity that draws no attention to itself. No drama, no slogans, no need to invent meaning beyond the act of living faithfully. He ran not to inspire but to endure. And because he endured, he inspired.

Somewhere on a shelf in our home is a children’s book called Fauja Singh Keeps Going. It is one of my child’s favourites. The story, told in spare sentences and soft colours, is not about winning but persisting. The message is gentle but unwavering: you don’t have to be fast, you just have to keep going. What Fauja Singh lived was not a motivational slogan but a moral rhythm.

He spoke little, prayed much, and ate simply. He was a practising Sikh, not in the performative sense, but in the quiet continuity of action: seva, simran, discipline, gratitude. The Sikh tradition speaks often of chardi kala—the spirit of optimism under pressure. It is not cheerfulness. It is moral uplift without denial. Fauja Singh embodied it. There was joy in him, but it was not loud. It was deep, and rooted in something far older than the marathons he came to symbolise.

He once said he ran while talking to God. Not to win, not to be seen. He ran, in other words, as devotion. The act of moving forward became, for him, a form of prayer. That is not metaphor. It is a kind of ethical posture. The Sikh understanding of hukam—the divine will, the order of the cosmos—is not unlike the Stoic concept of fate. Both suggest that we cannot unilaterally shape events, only our response to them. Both teach that freedom lies not in what happens, but in how we stand within what happens. Fauja Singh did not pit himself against the world. He moved with it, even when it broke his heart.

This is not to idealise suffering. He knew grief intimately. He had lost family, witnessed violence, been uprooted more than once. He had every reason to collapse into bitterness. But he chose not to. And this choice—to keep moving without resentment—is not instinctive. It is cultivated. It is a discipline. And like all real disciplines, it does not dazzle. It endures.

To endure, for Singh, was not to wait for life to pass. It was to move into it, daily, even at great cost. He had lived through partition, through war, through migration. He knew what it meant to be displaced. Yet he carried no resentment. The discipline of steady action—early mornings, walks, prayer, humility—became his way of refusing to be defined by loss.

He was not interested in spectacle. He turned down sponsorships from companies whose products he did not believe in. He declined offers that conflicted with his principles. That too is a kind of speed: the refusal to rush toward acclaim at the cost of one’s integrity. In a culture saturated with noise, Fauja Singh taught by silence.

There is an understated heroism in simplicity. The modern world celebrates reinvention, disruption, visibility. He practised repetition, continuity, modesty. There is nothing glamorous about waking early to walk alone in the fog. But there is something deeply human about it. Something enduring. In that sense, his marathon was not the 26 miles, but the life itself.

His death, sudden as it was, does not erase the calm he carried. He was struck while walking, but he had already reached a destination. That is not to romanticise. It is to say that he had, long before, chosen a way of being. And that choice continued whether journalists were present or not. The accident was not his ending. It was a moment in a much larger movement—a life of alignment between values and action.

We will remember the turban, the beard, the upright form crossing the line. But those were symbols of something quieter: a man who, in age and sorrow, did not give up. Who did not shout. Who simply rose, and moved.

In an age frantic for novelty, he reminds us of what it means to be constant. In a time of curated lives, he reminds us of lived simplicity. In a world often afraid of old age, he bore it without apology. And in doing so, he returned something sacred to the public eye: the dignity of time well used.

There are many kinds of strength. Some dazzle. Some dominate. His strength was the kind that comes from moral coherence—when belief, action, and endurance align. That strength does not win headlines. But it lasts. It finishes the race.

Fauja Singh keeps going. Not because he lived forever, but because he showed how one might live at all.

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