Scottish Runner Sets a 10K World Best at the Age of 90

Ian Winship, 90, ran the Cumbernauld 10K in 1:04:37 on Sept. 13, a time no man his age is known to have bettered on the road. He finished unsteady on his feet and waved away the wheelchair the paramedics brought over.

The run was first reported by Neil Pooran for PA Media. “It’s just unbelievable,” Winship told the agency. “Cumbernauld might be famous now because of me.”

His pace works out at 10:24 per mile (6:28/km) for the full 6.2 miles, on a road course that loops out of Broadwood Stadium and comes back into it. Marathon Handbook’s own 10K benchmarks give 1:31:00 as the beginner average for men 80 and over, a bracket with no upper limit on it, and Winship went more than 26 minutes quicker at 90, which is the sort of gap age grading exists to express.

Scottish Athletics was careful with the word. Its spokesperson called the run a world best rather than a world record, telling PA that road marks like this one “can be difficult to confirm.” The structural reason sits above the governing body. World Masters Athletics recognizes world records for only four events held outside a stadium, and its 2026 rules of competition name them: the marathon, and the 10K, 20K and 50K road walks. A 10K road run is not on that list at any age, so Winship’s time has nowhere official to go. The lists that do carry marks like his, the Association of Road Racing Statisticians among them, are kept by statisticians rather than by a federation, and they are unofficial by design.

On the track, where WMA does ratify, the numbers are quicker. The M90 10,000m record under automatic timing belongs to the late David Carr of Australia, who ran 1:02:48.93 at Cannington in August 2022, one of six M90 world records he set that year before his death the following July. Germany’s Alfred Althaus was hand-timed at 1:02:21.5 in Athens as long ago as 1994, quicker still. Both were flat ovals under a different rulebook, but they are the marks a record nerd will reach for.

Scotland has been on this ground before when Gordon Porteous of Maryhill Harriers took an M90 10,000m world record at Coatbridge in October 2004, in the same North Lanarkshire council area Winship ran through this month. Porteous won 23 world and European age-group medals and died in 2008, aged 93.

Placing 1:04:37 is hard mostly because there is so little to place it against. The quickest M85 10K on the statisticians’ lists is 48:57, run by Germany’s Fokke Kramer at Kaltenkirchen in May 2023, and the gap between the two says more about how few men are still on start lines at 90 than about how fast anyone is. Very few masters runners keep racing into their 90s, which is why performances at that age arrive as individual stories rather than rivalries: Bill Schwarz finishing his first marathon at 90, Charly Bancarel completing Paris at 93, Emma Mazzenga taking the W90 indoor 200m world record in Padova.

Winship was a paratrooper, and at Suez in 1956 he came down over Egypt at Port Said. He spent his working life afterwards as a steeplejack, and he told PA that a regimen of long walks every day is what keeps him fit. “I’ve got a purpose, I want to stay alive,” he said. “If I sit in the house I’ll vegetate. I must meet people.”

The family had three runners in the field. Winship ran with his daughter, Fiona Fleming, and her son Kyle, 26, who placed third. Kyle Fleming told PA they had entered together in previous years. “He gets up every morning, goes to get his paper, goes to get his coffee,” he said. “He does 20,000 steps a day.”

North Lanarkshire Council puts the race on, and this year was its nineteenth edition. The council says it took the Scottish 10K prize at the 2018 National Running Awards. A spokesperson for Scottish Athletics said the governing body was “delighted to hear of Ian’s great run,” adding that “athletics can be for life if that’s what you want.”

His next challenge, he told PA, will be to “live to 100.”