Chennai :

“Post retirement, you have to keep yourself occupied,” says Arun Krishnan . The 67-year-old may sound like any other elderly person striving to remain purposeful, but make no mistake, Krishnan is India’s oldest Ironman , and acknowledges better than anyone else that age is just a number. “Anything is possible if one has the will,” he says.

In 2009, a day after he turned 60, he sat down to prepare himself a bucket list and wrote down a determined entry – ‘The Ironman Asia Pacific Championship, Cairns, Australia’. To Krishnan, a fitness buff with extraordinary levels of endurance, this seemed doable with rigorous training. However, two years later in 2011, his doctors informed him that his knees had worn out and forbade him from climbing stairs, leave alone running.

“I quickly took to Ayurveda, which helped me do the Chicago, Berlin and the Half Iron marathons. But that said, Ayurveda worked for me, it need not for everyone. One must be careful,” says Krishnan.

In January 2014, misfortune struck again when he was all set to compete in the Tokyo marathon. His knees locked up and he completed it in six agonizing hours, swearing “I’d never run again.” But the itch of completing an Ironman triathlon got the better of him and he once again sought Ayurveda, this time, along with physiotherapy. The Ironman games called for a rigorous training spanning 24 weeks, and when Krishnan came to know of even older contenders participating in it including an 84-year-old Japanese man and an 82-year-old Catholic nun – it gave him further impetus to see it through.

After braving a swelling sea following sudden rain, Krishnan finished the triathlon with a 3.9km swim, 180km of cycling and a 42km run, in 16 hours, 27 minutes and 35 seconds, about two minutes and 25 seconds ahead of the cut-off time.

After achieving such an incredible feat, one may think that a man of Krishnan’s age would like to go easy. But not for a man with Krishnan’s spirit. He, instead, penned down another task to his bucket list – to train for another two decades to run an Ironman with his granddaughter. “She’s two years old now,” he smiles, adding “But more immediately, I want to run the Boston qualifier.”