Britain's oldest running team, launched by sports brand Altra, has a combined age of 321. The team includes Peter Giles, an 82-year-old former carpenter and bass guitarist who won five gold medals at the World Masters Athletics Championships in Sweden last year.
Peter Giles and his simple training approach
Giles, who took up competitive running in his mid-forties, broke the British 5km road record for his age group in December, finishing in 22 minutes and 29 seconds. He runs around 30 miles a week, avoids the gym and takes only vitamin D supplements.
After a race, he celebrates with coffee and a cigar. 'Most runners overtrain and over-complicate everything. The older I get, the simpler it all becomes,' he said.
Research on why runners quit
Giles appears to be bucking a wider trend, with new research suggesting many British runners abandon the sport decades earlier. Around seven million people took to the streets of England to run last year, yet research commissioned by Altra found the average British runner gives up the sport at the age of 39.
According to the research, one in three runners who quit do so because of injury. More than half of those surveyed said they had suffered a setback serious enough to stop them running for three months or longer, while one in six of that group said they had never fully recovered. Nearly a quarter said life simply got in the way.
The Legacy Team members
Altra formed Britain's oldest running team to inspire the next generation of runners to adopt good running habits to enable them to go the distance. Alongside Giles is 79-year-old Rajinder Singh MBE, who has completed marathons around the world and is recognised as one of the oldest runners in the Sikh community.
The team also includes Laurence Cummings, 85, who holds 204 age-category parkrun records across England and Scotland, and Pritpal Kaur, 75, the oldest British Asian woman to complete this year's London Marathon.
Rob Herdman, marketing director at Altra, said: 'Last year, our team spent a lot of time at races across the UK and we kept finding ourselves inspired by the same people. Not necessarily the fastest runners or those standing on the podium, but the runners in their seventies and eighties who were still out there doing something they loved.'
'Every time we saw them, we'd say the same thing: 'I want to be like that when I'm older. That simple thought became the inspiration for this campaign.'
'The Legacy Team is a celebration of runners who show what's possible and a reminder that the choices we make today can shape whether we're still running thirty or forty years from now.'
