Fauja Singh may be older than the zip, but he's still got some. He was born before formica was invented and his collection of wrinkles will confirm it. He arrived on the planet months before Roald Amundsen discovered the South Pole in December 1911.
Most men his age are either entombed, embalmed or exhausted and even he said his buddies have all passed. So how come he's sprinting past me at the East Coast? He's 101, I'm 50, this is a mismatch. This dude is twice the man I am. A centenarian by definition, a rugged centurion from Rome in attitude.
Later, this runner who is in town for the Standard Chartered Marathon Singapore's 10km event, grins and says in Punjabi: "I'm competitive."
Fauja's name roughly means soldierly and with his white flowing beard he resembles Gandalf in a yellow turban. A wizard in shoes. He runs at a neat, measured clip. His breathing is better than mine (a lifetime of no smoking and alcohol, alas, really does help). His knees lift high. "Yours don't," says his coach and interpreter Harmander Singh, to me.
Fauja is standing near the sea and I almost ask if he can walk on water. He started running marathons at 89 in 2000. He's done nine. One in 5hr 40min at 92. He does 16km a day even now of running and walking. This year, this grandfather of 16 and great-grandfather of six, finished the London Marathon in 7:49:21. When I ask if running ever brings pains to his ancient bones, he says he just runs it off.
Now he's retired from marathons. "He's got nothing to prove," says Harmander. Maybe he'll take up bungee jumping.
Where fact meets fiction in the Fauja story we don't know. He was born to a farmer in rural Punjab at a time when presumably birth certificates weren't fashionable. When he got his passport in the 1960s, to go see his children in England, his year of birth was registered as 1911. There it is, believe it or not. But how does it matter? If he was 89, or 93, would his story be less wondrous?
Fauja moved to England in 1992. Whether he ran before, or why he started running is not entirely clear. Harmander says that he would take part in short races in tournaments held to commemorate one of the Sikh gurus. Someone suggested he run longer distances whereupon he turned up to train in 1999 in sneakers and a three-piece suit.
The legend had begun. By the end of it, and Fauja tells this story with a boy's glee, he had customised adidas footwear, with "Fauja" inscribed on one shoe and "Singh" on the other. He has a book on his life called the Turbaned Tornado. And he once, reportedly, set eight world records - from the 100m to 5,000m - in one day as a 100 year old. Four of them did not even exist before.
Running is who this man is and running is what he does and running keeps him alive. If he does not flinch from familiar questions it is because he recognises his reality: "If I stop running, who will talk to me?" Bristling with positivity, he - a London Olympics torchbearer - speaks of Paralympians and says, "If they can do it, why not able-bodied people."
Fauja owns no unique secret beyond a DNA we can't see and a healthy early life lived in the fields; he follows no fancy diet though a cup of hot milk at night is essential; he takes no pills but a vitamin and what an advertisement he might be for it.
Yet as he leans back and drinks water on a hot morning, this man who cannot read or write offers us a message that is profound, familiar and literate. As the poet Samuel Ullman said: "Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul."
Fauja embraces life. With some style apparently. Evidently he has an Armani suit in his cupboard and arrived with nine pairs of shoes for five days. These do not include his running ones. "He's like a woman," giggled his team. He didn't respond. When last I saw him, on the beach, he was giving another interview, sitting there like patient Father Time wearing a gold watch.
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