An elderly man in London lost his wife and then his son, and didn’t know what to do with the grief, so he started running. Eleven years later, at 100, he crossed the finish line of a full marathon in just over eight hours.

Out on the course, in the thin October dark, a hundred-year-old man in a yellow turban was still going. His coach later said, plainly, that Singh had stopped believing his life was worth continuing. None of which makes running a substitute for proper care, and Singh was not conducting an experiment on himself. Somebody was expecting himIn 1999 he was introduced to Harmander Singh, a coach in east London, through a mutual acquaintance. An old man in Ilford, a long way from his fields, deciding on an ordinary morning to go outside and move.