Air Marshal P.V. Iyer retired from the Indian Air Force 35 years ago, but the nickname Running Marshal is still going strong. He has run more than 1.2 lakh kilometres in the past 46 years and, at age 93, he runs eight to nine kilometres every day and works out in the gym five days a week. Recently, he wrote a book, Fit at Any Age, which captures his philosophy of fitness.
“I was not an athletic person in my youth,” says Iyer. “I was an indoor person [interested in] bridge and billiards. I started the fitness journey only when Air Force demanded something from me when I was 47.”
In 1976, the air chief ordered that all Air Force personnel clear a physical test. Running a mile within seven minutes was one of the tests for Iyer’s age category. As he started preparing for the test, he realised that there is strength in every individual, whatever be the age.
Within a few weeks, Iyer became fit to run at a good pace. He continued running every day, after clearing the test comfortably. “If you are a regular runner, you won’t get tired because of the jogging,” he says. He subjected his body to tougher challenges, drawing strength from thoughts about man’s hunter-gatherer ancestors who outran predators.
In 1981, Iyer made a broad leather belt weighted with lead pellets and jogged on the dune-like sandy banks of the Ganga in Kanpur. “I did this twice a week for one hour. Imagine the strength it gave to my legs.” A few months later, he won the gold medal in the 5000m race at the first Asia Masters Athletics Championship in Singapore. Inspiring people to join his fitness movement, he organised an ultra-long distance run of 270km from Agra to Delhi in 1985. More than 300 people participated in it, and about 100 completed the run.
Iyer did not skip his daily run even on the days his daughters, Indu and Mina, got married. He got up at 3am, finished the run by 5, and was ready by 6 to go from the Air Force Station at Avadi to the wedding locations in Chennai. He has kept a diary of his fitness journey, one journal a year. Now he has 45 such journals. “Though storing them is a challenge, they come in handy,” he writes in his book. “For example, if I am injured after a workout, I refer back and check when I had a similar injury in the past, what kind of run caused that injury and what I did to get over it.”
He advises fitness enthusiasts to record their pulse rate every morning in a diary. Over the years, Iyer’s resting pulse rate has dropped to below 40. “It is natural for athletes to have a low pulse rate,” he says. Once, while he was a bystander at a hospital in Nagpur, a nurse took his pulse and ran in alarm to the doctors. Iyer had to explain to the doctors all about his exercise regimen.
Iyer has trained his mind also. He speaks French and Russian, besides English and six Indian languages. He learned French on his own as a young officer in Srinagar, waking up at 4am even on the coldest morning. He later served as an interpreter at the directorate of intelligence at the Air Headquarters in Delhi, earning the nickname Frenchy.
He perfected his Telugu and Kannada while jogging during the Covid lockdown. “I would put on the headset and listen to conversations in these languages,” he says. “It is limitless what our mind can do. You can learn new languages or musical instruments, at any age.” His whole family is fond of the word game Boggle. “Whenever there is a get-together, we play it,” he says. Besides the daughters, he has a son, Parameswaran Iyer, who is now CEO of NITI Aayog.
The book on fitness was his son’s idea. “His suggestions usually take the form of convincing arguments,” Iyer writes in the book, which presents a happy perspective on old age. “Old age is not a calamity or something to be worried about but is designed by evolution to enable us to pass through an enjoyable period of life that is full of new experiences, activities and achievements…. Think of old age as a period of serenity, free from the rat race of life.”
FIT AT ANY AGE
A Practitioner’s Guide
By Air Marshal P.V. Iyer
Published by Bloomsbury India
Price: Rs499; pages: 200