Tapantosh Chakrabarty, 76, runs near his home in Calgary on Wednesday. Chakrabarty has run marathons on seven continents and completed the Tokyo Marathon for the fifth time in as many years in 2026.LEAH HENNEL/The Globe and Mail
Tapantosh Chakrabarty’s first marathon was nearly his last. More than halfway through the 42-kilometre race in 2000 in Vancouver, he felt fine.
The last 10 km, not so much.
“I could feel muscles in my legs tightening up here and there,” Chakrabarty said this week from Calgary, out of which he worked for Imperial Oil and its parent company Exxon, for more than 35 years. “Then it started to feel like my brain was shaking.”
By the time he finished, he was in so much pain that he was unable to walk straight. To go forward he had to go sideways over and over like a crab.
“I told myself I would never do it again,” he said.
The next day he returned to work and was such a physical mess that coworkers asked him what was wrong. “When I told people I had just run a marathon their jaws dropped,” Chakrabarty said.
Then Chakrabarty, who was born in Bangladesh and came to Canada in 1975, had a change of heart.
“After three or four days the pain subsided and I felt good,” he said. “My brain is as clear as the sky overhead.”
He is 76 now and has run 70 marathons and completed one 90-km ultramarathon in Durban, South Africa. He has competed in marathons on all seven continents and most recently earned his fifth Six-Star Medal from Abbott World Marathon Majors.
After he completed the Tokyo Marathon in March for the fifth straight time, the organization notified him that he is the oldest runner ever to receive five Six-Star Medals.
A communications officer for World Marathon Majors said Thursday that the organization receives results from each major marathon and inserts them into its system. The system matches the results to runners who have created profiles on its site, and awards them stars for each major run.
Chakrabarty shows off some of his marathon medals, including his Six-Star Medal, which is awarded to runners who complete the original six major marathons in Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago and New York.LEAH HENNEL/The Globe and Mail
Chakrabarty did not start running until he was 50. He started at shorter distances but was inspired to challenge himself more when he noticed colleagues had begun to reap health benefits from running in marathons.
Over the years he has done the Boston and New York marathons seven times, Berlin, London, Chicago and Tokyo six times each, and Calgary four. In 2025, after finishing the Tokyo race, he did the Boston and London marathons six days apart. In 2023, 2024 and 2025 he ran six world major marathons in each year.
Three marathons he completed while ill with a fever, strep throat and the flu. His fastest time is 3 hours 47 minutes and 13 seconds in 2009 in St. George, Utah.
In 2010, Chakrabarty was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and in 2015 it was discovered that he had a 90-plus per cent arterial blockage that required an emergency angioplasty.
At the time, a nurse told him she was glad she wasn’t married to him. Since then he has completed 21 more major marathons, currently as a participant in the 75- to 79-year-old age division.
“Marathon running isn’t fun but you get a medal, which is different from every other sport,” he said. “In others if you come home worse than third you leave empty-handed. In marathon running, everyone gets recognized as long as you cross the finish line by an allotted time.”
His life’s journey has taken him from Matlab, Bangladesh – where his family had no electricity or safe drinking water and had to protect their food from wild monkeys. When Tapantosh was in sixth grade, his dad died from cholera.
In 1971 Chakrabarty and his mother fled Bangladesh at the start of a nine-month war with Pakistan. They walked for two weeks, mostly at night when it was safest, and stayed with strangers until they crossed the border with India. There, they lived in a hut given by his maternal aunt near a refugee camp for nine months subsiding on nothing but lentils and rice.
After the war ended, he continued his studies at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology and ended up graduating at the top of his class – and then stayed on as lecturer.
Chakrabarty has raced around the world and says it's key to his health.LEAH HENNEL/The Globe and Mail
After he arrived in Canada, he got a master’s and a PhD in two fields over four years from the University of Waterloo and finished as the top student in the faculty of chemical engineering. That led him to be hired by Imperial Oil and after that by Exxon as a petroleum engineer.
He has more stories about his marathons than can be mentioned.
Once, he competed in a race at the Entabeni Wildlife Safari Conservancy in South Africa, where wildlife officials lined the course to prevent runners from being eaten by lions and other wild animals.
And in May of 2013 he competed in a race that began at the first base camp on Mount Everest. He flew into Kathmandu, Nepal, with other runners well ahead of time to acclimate himself to the altitude.
From there the group flew to Lukla, which is renowned as the world’s most dangerous airport owing to its short runway, deep descent and rapidly changing weather.
From there he and a group of runners trekked for nine days to the first base camp, which was near the starting line.
Chakrabarty doesn’t do marathons for the money, in fact he pays for his own travel and entry fees through retirement funds. He sees other benefits.
“I’m alive because I am running,” he said. “I am an example of a marathon’s power to heal. Those times I ran while ill I had immediate relief from my symptoms.”
He has become famous in Bangladesh.
“I have started a revolution,” he said. “Fifteen years ago there was not a single marathon there. Now there are so many half-marathons and marathons that you wouldn’t believe it.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported the number of marathons that Chakrabarty has completed since he was diagnosed with a heart-muscle-thickening disease in 2021. The article incorrectly stated that Chakrabarty fled Bangladesh together with both his mother and brother. It incorrectly said that Chakrabarty lived in a refugee camp. It incorrectly reported a conversation between Chakrabarty and a nurse as being between the nurse and Chakrabarty’s wife. It incorrectly stated that he had graduated top of his entire Faculty of Engineering class. It incorrectly said that Chakrabarty earned two PhDs. It incorrectly reported both the distance of the ultramarathon that Chakrabarty completed and the year he completed it. This version has been corrected. This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Durban and Entabeni.