At 88, he is the London Marathon’s oldest runner — and he only started at 57

Harry Newton did not lace up his first pair of running shoes until he was 57 years old. “I wasn’t a runner at all, I was age 57 when I started,” he says. More than three decades later, at 88, the Macclesfield resident holds a remarkable distinction: he is the oldest runner taking part in the 2026 TCS London Marathon.

The numbers behind his story are astonishing. Newton has finished the London Marathon 21 times and completed 31 marathons in total, a body of work built patiently over the years with his club, the Macclesfield Harriers. Where many people slow down with age, he has kept returning to the start line, drawn back again and again by the atmosphere of the world’s great road races.

““I wasn’t a runner at all, I was age 57 when I started,” he says.”

“The support from the crowds and the atmosphere and the organisation of it is unbelievable,” he says of the London event. “It is the one, certainly in the UK.” As the race’s oldest participant, he was set to receive VIP treatment, including private facilities and the flexibility to choose his own start time — small tributes to a runner who has become part of the fabric of the event.

Newton is running for the British Heart Foundation, and supporters rallied to his cause so strongly that he sailed past his initial £1,500 fundraising target well before race day. His story is a quiet rebuke to the idea that certain ambitions belong only to the young: a man who began running in his late fifties, still pinning on a number in his late eighties, and still turning every mile into money for a good cause.