Xie Kailu, still hale and smiling after more than 10 kilometers of running

Xie Kailu running in a sleeveless shirt through the streets in the early hours of the morning

CHONGQING (CQNEWS) -- Xie Kailu, 81, who lives in Beibei, Chongqing, goes out every morning at 4:00 a.m. sharp to run 10km at a time in a sleeveless shirt. He said he has been running for 50 years. After the video of Xie Kailu’s run was posted online, many young people expressed their admiration.

Recently, the reporter of Chongqing Morning Post met Xie Kailu in Beibei District who is only 1.5 meters tall with a thin build. He ran from his home in Zhuyuanbei Community to Wenxingwan that morning, a round trip of more than 10 kilometers, leaving at 4:00 sharp and returning at 5:20 a.m. Xie Kailu said he will keep running every day until he can’t run anymore. 

The biggest “enemy” of winter running is the bed

Xie Kailu is a self-disciplined man with a very precise biological clock. He goes to bed early at night and wakes up at 3:00 a.m. on time every morning, when the weather is so cold that a warm bed becomes his first obstacle to running.

“These days I have to wake up with a resolution and give myself a pep talk in the morning after I wake up.” Xie Kelu said that sometimes when he really didn’t want to get up, he would speak out the resolution he had made, “Don’t give up!” “You can’t slacken off, or all your previous efforts will be wasted!” He would shout a few times in bed to encourage himself.

At one point it even led to his wife asking him, “What are you doing?”

Xie Kailu had to explain, “I can’t get out of bed.”

“Some of my comrades advised me not to run, after all, I am already so old and they were worried that I wouldn’t be able to take it.” Xie Kailu said that after he returned to Zhuangyuanbei Community in Xiema Sub-district, he had a period of time when he ran less and got a cold, which he got several times a year. He then took up running again and has been largely illness-free for the dozen years since he has been running.

His wife and son are very supportive of his running, but every now and then he will give a word of caution to be safe. At 4 o’clock in the morning, Xie Kailu goes out for a run, which is the “safe time” that he has worked out, as there are few cars and people on the roads, but he has had many falls.

“Every time I fell, I got up in a hurry for fear that people would see me. It was so embarrassing...” Xie Kailu said with a smile.

He ran 15km to work when he was young

Xie Kailu, who insists on running, has a lung capacity that far exceeds that of ordinary young people. He can still sing at the top of his lungs when he runs 10km, and although he looks thin, he is very muscular.

Xie was born in Beibei, where he worked in a steel mill when he was 18, and enlisted as a soldier for eight years when he was 21. In 1968, Xie Kelu returned to Chongqing and was demobilized to an aluminum factory in Qijiang, where several hundred people had been discharged from the army at the time. They were all young men who had retired from the army and were so energetic that they met up in the morning to go for a run together, starting at 6:00 a.m. and running for an hour before going to work.

He later returned to work in an instrument factory in Beibei district, about 15km away from home. At that time there was no car, so if he walked to work, he would have to walk for at least two hours, if he ran it would only take an hour and a half. For most of the 27 years he worked at the factory, Xie Kailu ran to work, and for the 10 years after he retired to become a custodian, he still ran to work, but closer to home, only 4km away. (Translated by Wang Huixin, Fathom Language Limited)