65-YO Retired Navy Veteran Overcomes Diabetes To Win 200 Medals & 50 Trophies in Marathons

Picture a typical afternoon in a Delhi neighbourhood. Retired men gathered in parks, talking about their aches and their children’s careers, afternoon naps after lunch, followed by evenings stretched out in front of the television. 

It is a rhythm that society has scripted for those past 60 — slow down, settle in, let the world hand things over to the young.

Mahipal Singh did not get that memo. Or rather, he got a different one from his doctor.

A wake-up call after diabetes

In 2021, at 60 years old, freshly retired from years of running a business after a career in the Indian Navy, Singh was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. It was the kind of news that reshapes everything it touches: diet, energy, routine, and the sense of what is still possible. 

For many people, a diagnosis like this becomes the point at which one chapter closes and a more careful life begins.

For Singh, now 65, it turned out to be where something new started altogether.

He began running — not out of joy or ambition, but out of necessity. His body needed managing, and his blood sugar needed fighting. The logic was straightforward: move, and move consistently. 

The Navy had spent years teaching him the value of showing up every day, whether he felt like it or not, and retirement had not erased that instinct so much as left it waiting for something to do.

The early days were unremarkable by any measure. There were no crowds, no stopwatch, no medals. There was just a man in his sixties putting one foot in front of the other on Ghaziabad’s streets.

But within months, his diabetes came under control and his stamina built steadily. And somewhere inside that growing stack of early mornings, Singh began to notice that he was not simply managing a condition anymore but was also becoming good at something.

He entered his first competitive race, and then another. He began travelling to city championships, national meets, and open marathons across the country. 

He signed up for the 60-plus category in masters athletics and discovered an entire world of competition that most people never know exists — one where age is not a disadvantage but simply a bracket, and where the podium is entirely real.

There on, he stood on podiums often.

In 2023, two years after those first reluctant kilometres through Ghaziabad, Mahipal Singh travelled to Dubai for an international competition. In the 60-plus category, he entered three events — the 1,500 metres, the 5,000 metres, and the 10,000 metres. He finished first in all three.

Today, he holds approximately 200 medals and 50 trophies, and has competed in over 150 marathons. He also holds national records in his age group. 

Continuing to excel beyond 60 

By the arithmetic of the results sheet, he is one of India’s finest senior athletes — a description that would have seemed almost absurd to him at 60, sweating through runs on his doctor’s advice.

None of it grew from a lifelong love of running. What he had was the old military understanding that the body responds to consistent instruction — that given daily direction and sufficient time, it will adapt, strengthen, and surprise you in ways that no diagnosis can fully predict.

His routine today would look familiar to any serious athlete. He trains every morning without exception, with his diet being deliberate and balanced. He sleeps and wakes on schedule. He does not reach for his phone, and he does not spend his evenings in front of the television. 

In every meaningful sense, he lives like a professional — except that no one is paying him and no one asked him to do any of it. His one indulgence, the single softness in an otherwise austere daily life, is listening to old Hindi film songs, he said.

India is home to roughly 100 million people living with diabetes, and it is also home to a rapidly ageing population still looking for proof that the years after 60 can amount to something more than careful living. 

Mahipal Singh is not offering a formula or a prescription. He is simply the evidence — 200 medals deep, still running, still waking before the city does — that the question of what is possible does not have an age limit.

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