I have a new hero. His name is Hiromu Inada and he may well be the most physically active nonagenarian in the world.
Inada was born in 1932 and was employed by the broadcaster NHK until his retirement at 60 years old. He could have continued working, but his wife Michiko was ill with a rare, hemophilia-like condition and he decided to stay at home and look after her. Because it was too risky for her to use a kitchen knife, he taught himself to cook, and without her knowledge, he also took up a new hobby: keeping fit, and more specifically, keeping fit with the aim of entering a triathlon.
By his own admission, at first he could not swim more than a few metres, but kept going and soon discovered that he had a talent for that and the other two disciplines as well. After he competed in and just managed to finish his first triathlon, he confessed to Michiko what he had been doing in his spare time, and rather than being angry, she encouraged him to continue.
Inada’s wife passed away soon after, and for several months, he was too depressed to leave the house. After a while, however, he began training again and four years later as a 75-year-old, he finished first in his age group at a triathlon meet.
At this point, the majority of people would have rested on their laurels and settled back into an easygoing retirement, but Inada had bigger things in mind. When I first found out about him in a feature on TV a few months ago, I somehow managed to miss the fact that in his mid-seventies, he switched from the ordinary triathlon to the extraordinary ironman version, which involves a 3.9 km swim, followed by a 180.2 km cycle ride and a full (i.e. 42.2 km) marathon.
Understandably, perhaps, he failed to finish on his first couple of attempts, but soon got into the swing of things, and proceeded to break the world record for the oldest person to complete an ironman – not once, but twice. On the second occasion he was 86 and as far as I know, this record still stands.
Sadly – and partly because the Covid pandemic got in the way of his plans – Inada has not managed to be the first person in their nineties to complete an ironman (incidentally, isn’t about time that a more politically correct version of the term be coined? Ironperson, for example, or, er, ironthem?), and he has now slowed down to the point that he is entering shorter races. Not short, you understand, just shorter – the Cairns 70.3 Ironman in Australia, in which Inada was scheduled to compete last week, involves a 1.9 km swim, a 90 km bike ride, and a 21.1 km run.
This article on the triathlon.com website details his incredible training routine back in 2022, which included 13 km of swimming, 400 km of cycling, and 30 km of running a week (sensible man – since my own knee injury last year, I have vowed to mix more low-impact exercise into my own routine), and in the below interview with company director Yusuke Tamai, he says that one of his golden rules is to train every single day, even if it’s straight after a race (according to conventional wisdom, not quite so sensible): when you get older, he says, you have to keep moving or your body will start to deteriorate much more quickly than when you were younger.
Among other things, Inada’s training regime and his inability to keep still has resulted in injuries such as a broken pelvis and vertebrae, but if I was going to put money on someone living until they are 100, he would be my first choice.
The physician and researcher Peter Attia recently became famous for his book Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, in which he asserts the supreme importance of exercise in keeping us healthy and extending our life expectancy, and Hiromu Inada is a prime and admirable example of how to do this.
I have to admit that, as such a poor swimmer, I am unlikely to complete an ordinary triathlon, let alone an ironman and let alone in my eighties, but I find Inada incredibly inspiring, and fully intend to exercise my way at least into my nineties and possibly beyond.
