To stay healthy in his retirement years, Koichi Kitabatake swam every week at a gym near his home in Yokohama, Japan. But after undergoing cataract surgery at 74, his doctor forbade him from swimming because the risk of infection was too high.
An instructor at the gym posed a suggestion: What about runningt?
He started off light, but when he began to sign up for local 5Ks, he said, “my wife was impressed.” At 78, he decided it was time to ramp up.
“The New York marathon was my main target,” Mr. Kitabatake said, but his pace was too leisurely for the race’s cutoff time. He ran his first marathon in 2012, in Paris.
Mr. Kitabatake is 91 now. In the 13 years since he began competing in marathons, he has run in 33, accruing races like notches in his belt. The New York race is his third marathon this year.
At his age, Mr. Kitabatake is constantly hitting milestones and breaking records. At 89, he was the oldest runner at the 2022 London Marathon. Last year, after running the Sydney Marathon at 90, he became the oldest person to ever finish that race.
Mr. Kitabatake has more than two years to go before he can break the record for oldest finisher in the New York marathon. (That record is held by Josef Galia of Germany, who ran in 1991 at the age of 93.)
Mr. Kitabatake is one of only seven nonagenarian runners in the race’s history, according to the New York Road Runners, the marathon’s organizer.
His marathon training is methodical: Mr. Kitabatake starts each day by stretching, and he has been running several miles twice a week to stay limber. But he keeps his pre-race runs to a minimum to avoid injury.
“At my age, too much practice doesn’t make any sense,” Mr. Kitabatake said. His goal, above all, is to be able to keep running.
And he prefers to listen to his body on race days, he said, than to push for a certain time or pace: “A marathon,” he said, “is very unpredictable. It all depends on the day.”
And what’s on his mind as he travels through the course?
Mr. Kitabatake was matter of fact. “Many people ask me this question,” he said. “I just try to concentrate on thinking nothing.”
“And not falling,” he added.
Mr. Kitabatake is taking on the New York marathon for the third time, after running it first in 2014 and again in 2018, when he, at 85, was one of the race’s two oldest runners.
The other was Ginette Bedard, a runner from Queens, who was also 85.
Ms. Bedard beat him that year, Mr. Kitabatake remembered with a smile, by almost half an hour. He emailed Ms. Bedard this year to see how his worthy nonagenarian competitor was doing, but he didn’t hear back.
“I hope she is OK,” Mr. Kitabatake said.
Taylor Robinson is a Times reporter covering the New York City metro area.
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