A prog rocker is now Britain's fastest old man. He shares his secrets with Simon Usborne.
Peter Giles couldn't wait to turn 80 last summer. Not because he particularly loves getting older, but because it would tip him into a new age category as a masters athlete - the term for competitors over the age of 35.
"I'd been looking forward to it for about two years", he tells me at his flat above a charity shop in a village near Esher in Surrey. "I thought, I'll just get there and then I can go for all these new records".
It didn't take long for Giles to start ticking them off. Despite battling a nasty cold, he and three fellow octogenarians broke the British record in the 4 x 100m relay race at the World Masters Athletics Championships in Gothenburg, Sweden in August last year. Across six events, he won five gold medals and a silver all in the M80 category for men aged 80 - 84.
"What a memorable championship", Giles, who only started competing at the age of 44, wrote shortly after the event. "I had come from schoolboy cross country winner to world champion in only 69 years".
You may recognise him for another reason. Giles used to be in the influential progressive rock band King Crimson. While he was at Bournemouth Grammar School in the Sixties, winning cross country races without even trying, he was also playing bass with his older brother Michael, a drummer. In a series of bands, Michael went on to co-found King Crimson in 1968; Peter featured on their second album, In The Wake of Poseidon in 1970.
When Giles answers the door, I'm confused. The tall, slim man in front of me wears cargo trousers and orange New Balance trainers with crisp white socks. His thick hair, only half grey and barely receding, is swept back in a ponytail. He walks with a straight back and light feet. Has a son or nephew joined us as a chaperone?
In fact Giles was born in June 1944, days after the D-Day landings. He now has his sights set on breaking more national M80 records.
He broke the British 5km road record in Battersea in December with a time of just 22min 29sec. This year he's targeting the 1,500m, his favourite event, plus the 4km and 10km track records, both set by an 80-year-old chap called Stephen Charlton in 2007 (22min 44sec and 46min 10 sec respectively). He's also gunning for the 1hr 41min British half-marathon time set 30 years ago by the Scottish engineer Gordon Porteous, who was also 80. These are all times that would be respectable for men half Giles' age (at his nearest 5km Parkrun for example, he would place in the top 50 out of more than 500 finishers).
"For half my life I've wanted to find out what I was capable of as a runner," he says. "It's been a strange but happy experience".
Giles is a reluctant poster pensioner. "I may have broken records, but I have no wish to give advice to people or get them to change," he says. He insists that a simple diet, a positive attitude - and a profound spiritualism, which we'll come to - keep him going.
But there are lessons to be found in his approach to life, and he says he's happy if they are inspiring. We start with his diet. He's tried it all over the years, from high-protein to high-carb regimes, but has settled on simplicity, free from anything too processed. He starts with porridge and an orange for breakfast, then three eggs scrambled for an early lunch. In the afternoon he'll have muesli with a fruit salad, then dinner is fish or meat with vegetables and, occasionally, a glass of wine.
He's not bothered with supplements or shakes, though he takes vitamin D to keep his bones strong, and drinks plenty of water the day before races. He sleeps well. He never goes to the gym, instead preferring to mend fences and lug furniture around (his day job is as a handyman for a local lettings firm).
At home he spins gently on an exercise bike, but doesn't bother with anything intense. He does daily planking exercises to keep his core and back strong. Does he stretch after races? "No, I usually go and have a coffee and a cigar".
Running is his main exercise. He regularly clocks up 30 miles a week, usually as a couple of 10-mile runs as well as some shorter jogs in the woods near his home. "Most runners over train", he says. "They have fetishes about running, and I find that the older I get the simpler everything gets. I don't complicate anything".
He deplores the, "corrupt food system" that sets out to feed us addictive slop. He accepts that illness and disease too often stop older people staying fit. But otherwise, he says, "everybody knows what you need to do to lead a healthy life. You just need to eat lots of fruit and vegetables and do some regular exercise. There's no magic in it".
If not magic, then perhaps some spirituality. Giles and his wife Yasmine, a piano teacher, believe in transmutation, or the power to channel energies to transform the mind and the body right down to the cellular level.
He pulls out a small crystal on a chain, which he consults with often quotidian questions. "Body, shall I run today?" he asks. The crystal hanging from his hand begins to make anticlockwise circles. "That's a no", he says (he has a cold and is skipping today's run). "Show me a yes". The crystal starts making circles in the other direction.
He is nothing if not good humoured about my scepticism ("I have to warn you, he's a spiritual laggard", he tells Yasmine later, laughing). Still, you don't need a crystal to appreciate the power of positive thought to banish self-limiting beliefs and lift the body, even if that's just out of an armchair. "If you stop moving, you've got no chance", Giles says. He has suffered niggles in the groin and hamstrings, but says he knows when to slow down and recover.
He thinks people of his vintage too readily conform to declining expectations of what they can or should do. "I realised only recently that I have a mentality where I always have something to look forward to, whether it's the next meal or meeting somebody the next day or running, so that I'm not wishing my life away", he says. "It's a way of generating my own enthusiasm for life".
Music also lifts his spirits. After King Crimson, he moved to south London where he worked as a carpenter and played football and cricket, then became a resident bandleader by night at a Kensington hotel. Yasmine started playing piano there in 1988, and the pair married within weeks. They still perform and record as a duo. "We immediately connected. We're musical soulmates".
Giles started competitive running that same year. As well as a hobby, it became a kind of project. How much could he achieve? A decade later, aged "about 55", he peaked at 17min 45sec in the 5km. A quarter of a century later he thinks he can go better than the recent record time he set for the same distance in Battersea. "I think I can get close to 21 minutes", he says.
He wasn't punching the air as he won his medals in Sweden. "I'm quite a detached person emotionally, so I don't get over excited about things", he tells me before I leave him to his muesli. "When you've done all the work, winning is a natural consequence of what's gone before".
Courtesy of
The Sunday Times
9th February 2025
Comments