Running has been a part of Antonio Rao’s life for 80 years, and the 92-year-old Italian man has no plans of stopping anytime soon. This year, he completed his 30th consecutive Rome marathon in under seven hours.

If you need some extra motivation to get up off the couch and go for a run, just know that a 92-year-old man recently completed the 42-kilometer Rome marathon for the 30th consecutive time, improving on last year’s time by 10 minutes. Rao is not your average pensioner. He lives for running and still trains 20 to 30 kilometers each week. Born in 1933, he ran away from his home in Calabria to Rome when he was just 10 and hasn’t stopped running since. He claims he started running daily as a teenager to keep up with a friend, but it became a huge part of his life, and he hasn’t missed a single Rome marathon in the last three decades.

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Many people struggle to hike using their legs, but one Chinese man has become famous for climbing his country’s most popular mountains on his hands.

38-year-old Sun Guo Shan only started practicing handstand climbing in May of 2023, but last year he embarked on a monumental challenge – to climb the 50 most popular mountains in China by Spring 2025. Previously employed in the education system, Sun realized the importance of health during the COVID-19 pandemic and decided to convey a message of health training but also honor his country’s mountainous scenic spots in a unique way. Sun Guo Shan began his unusual challenge in May 2024, but he only went viral in November 2024, when a clip of him tackling Haibat – the highest peak of Wudang Mountain at 1,612 meters – using his hands went viral.

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55-year-old Hilde Dosogne of Belgium recently set a new world record for most consecutive marathons after running 366 full marathons (over 15,000 km) in 2024.

On May 30, 2024, Hilde Dosogne had already broken the women’s world record for most consecutive marathons – 150, set by Erchana Murray Bartlett – but she didn’t stop running until December 31st, when she recorded her 366th consecutive full marathon of the year. It’s a monumental achievement on par with that of the men’s category set in 2023 by Brazilian runner Hugo Farias who also completed 366 marathons. As you can imagine, running 42.195 km per day, every day, for a year is incredibly taxing on the body, but while Hilde had to overcome fatigue and bursitis (painful inflammation of the joints), she claims that the mental stress of having to show up at the starting line every day was her most difficult challenge.

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71-year-old Jin Hui recently became the first Chinese man over the age of 70 to run 100 meters in under 14 seconds during a competition that saw him winning five gold medals in his age group.

Jin Hui became known as China’s “hardcore uncle” after dominating the 2024 China Track and Field Masters, a competition that challenges athletes between the ages of 35 and 84 to compete in a variety of track and field events. It was Jin Hui’s second time competing in the prestigious event following his debut in 2023 when he finished second in the 100-meter race with a respectable time of 15.26 seconds, but he somehow managed to blow everyone away with his performance. Not only did the septuagenarian set a new national record for the 100-meter race in his age group, but he also snatched the gold medal in all the five events he participated in.

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At an age when most people struggle to move around without a cane or a crutch, 88-year-old Ploutarchos Pourliakas just completed his 12th consecutive Athens Marathon (42.195km / 26.22 miles)

If you ever need a bit of extra motivation to get up off the couch and go for a jog, remember that an 88-year-old man finished the Athens Marathon, aka the Authentic Marathon, crossing the finish line in 6 hours and 31 minutes. Ploutarchos Pourliakas only took up running at the age of 73, after getting inspired by his son, an ultra-marathon runner, but he quickly became obsessed with it, running four to five kilometers daily and up to 20km on weekends. He has finished the Athens Marathon 12 times, and despite getting older, Pourliakas actually managed to improve on last year’s performance, 42.195km (26.22 miles) eighteen minutes faster.

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Nigel Richards, a 57-year-old New Zealand scrabble phenom, recently won the 2024 Spanish-Language Scrabble World Championship despite not speaking the language at all.

It’s been almost a decade since we first wrote about the talented Mr. Nigel Richards; He had just won the 2015 French-Language Scrabble Championship despite being completely unable to have a conversation in French. It was a remarkable feat that made international news headlines at the time. Richards was already known as the world’s best scrabble player and had earned nicknames like ‘the Tiger Woods of Scrabble,’ but this was completely unheard of. A person who didn’t speak French at all had run through the world’s best French-speaking Scrabble players to earn the title of world champion. Some thought it was a fluke, but Nigel has repeated the feat since, and he recently proved he could do it in other languages he didn’t speak.

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A 31-year-old man has been praised for his exemplary filial piety after selling his possessions to travel through China with his paralyzed mother, carrying her on his back just like she did with him when he was a baby.

Xiao Ma was just eight years old when his parents were involved in a terrible car accident that claimed his father’s life and left his mother unable to move. He and his older sister were forced to take care of themselves as well as their mother, who was later diagnosed with cerebral atrophy, as a consequence of the car accident. Growing up, he worked in the fields picking cotton, was an apprentice in various fields and opened his own restaurant in Xinjiang. Most of the money he made went towards his mother’s recovery, and his hard work seemed to pay off, as the woman was slowly able to leave the bed that had become her prison to sit in a wheelchair and even take a few small steps. However, a few years ago, Xiao Ma got the devastating news that his mother’s cerebral atrophy was not only incurable but progressing at a steady pace. That’s when he decided to make the best of the time he had left with her.

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Helio da Silva, a retired business executive from Brazil, single-handedly planted over 41,000 trees in his hometown of Sao Paolo over the last two decades.

Flying over the Brazilian metropolis of Sao Paolo, it’s tough to miss the 3.2-kilometers-long and 100-meter-wide green strip of trees wedged between two of the city’s busiest roads. It is known as Tiquatira Linear Park, and it is the work of a single man who worked tirelessly for over 20 years in order to transform a previously dilapidated area into an actual jungle within the urban jungle that is Sao Paolo. Originally from the town of Promissao, about 500km from Sao Paulo, Helio da Silva was a successful business executive for many years, but after retiring, he took it upon himself to transform the degraded banks of the Tiquatira River into a green oasis for his community. He started planting trees there in 20023 and hasn’t stopped since.

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Clips of Canadian basketball phenom Jeremy Gohier, who at 13 years of age is already 7 feet and 3 inches tall, towering over his teenage opponents have been going viral online.

Jeremy Gohier is not your average 13-year-old. He is already considerably taller than the average NBA player (6-foot-6) so he usually makes short work of his teenage opponents, dunking on them with ease, blocking shots effortlessly, and moving around the court without anyone being able to stop him. His athleticism and basketball skills are nothing to scoff at, but it is Jeremy’s impressive frame that has everyone talking about him these days. In the video highlights doing the rounds on social media, Gohier looks so dominant that you can’t help but feel a bit bad for the kids having to play against him.

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An Indian man with an incredible memory recently set a new world record by reciting a whopping 14,000 digits of Euler’s number in just 49 minutes.

Deepu V has always had an uncanny memory when it came to numbers. He once set a national record by reciting 2,000 digits of the irrational number pi faster than anyone else, and claims to have committed 500 telephone numbers to memory. But when he heard about a world record for memorizing the most decimal places of Euler’s number, he saw an opportunity to have his name featured in the renowned Guinness Book of Records. He spent four months preparing for this epic attempt and took under an hour to blow the previous record of 10,122 digits right out of the water.

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Zhang Sixuan, a 9-year-old girl from China’s Henan province, bested some of the world’s most elite kung fu masters to earn the title of “Shaolin Kung Fu Star” at this year’s World Shaolin Games.

There are millions of Shaolin Kung fu practitioners around the world, and every year tens of thousands of them compete for a chance to be invited to participate in the World Shaolin Games Finals. This year, an international cast of 124 kung fu practitioners was invited to show off their skills at a Shaolin temple in central China’s Henan Province, in front of respected kung fu masters and an audience of kung fu enthusiasts. Among them was a 9-year-old girl whose incredible flexibility and mastery of tong zi gong (a form of Shaolin kung fu) stunned both the judges and the crowd, earning her the coveted title of Shaolin Kung Fu Star.

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A Vietnamese woman has been dubbed a “sleepless mutant” because of her alleged ability to shun sleep completely. She claims to have remained awake continuously for the last three decades.

49-year-old Nguyen Ngoc My Kim is known as “the seamstress who never sleeps” in her home province of Long An, a nickname she gladly accepts because it apparently suits her. Every time Miss Kim’s reputation attracted the attention of the media, she confirmed that she hadn’t slept in several decades, adding that the complete lack of sleep hadn’t affected her health at all. However, the Vietnamese seamstress has always been quick to point out that she wasn’t born with the ability to function without sleep, she conditioned herself to stay up late ever since she was a little girl. At first, she would lose sleep because she loved reading late into the night, and later, when she started working as a seamstress, she worked late in order to complete her orders. At one point, she didn’t feel the need to sleep at all, so she didn’t.

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Xiao Mai, a beautiful 25-year-old woman from China’s Heilongjiang province, has been having trouble finding a suitable boyfriend because of her height. She is 2.26 meters tall.

A few months ago, Xiao Mai introduced herself to the world in a short clip that quickly went viral on social media mainly because of the young woman’s impressive height. At 2.26 meters (7 ft 5 in), the 25-year-old dwarfs even the tallest of men, and that apparently makes her very intimidating to the opposite sex. Posting the first video of herself was Mai’s mother’s idea. She had watched a clip of a girl from Shanghai proposing to her boyfriend online and was inspired to use the same technique to find her daughter a boyfriend. Apart from showing off Xiao Mai’s impressive physical features, it also showed moments from her daily life as well as an appeal from her mother to everyone watching to suggest suitable boyfriends for her. The video went viral and before long, strangers started showing up at the family’s door in Heilongjiang asking to meet the girl.

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23-year-old Ganesh Baraiya is living proof that nothing is impossible. Despite facing discrimination because of his short stature, he managed to become the world’s shortest doctor.

Ganesh Baraiya was born in the Talaja Thaluka area of Gujarat, India, and faced adversity from a very young age. He was born normal, but at the age of four, his parents noticed that his head was outgrowing his body, so they took him to a doctor. They learned that the boy suffered from an incurable condition and there was nothing anyone could do. Wanting to help her son, Ganesh’s mother put a tub-like helmet on his head to prevent it from growing and give his body a chance to catch up. In school, he was often ridiculed because of his large head and short stature, but he also had friends who stuck by him and he was able to focus on his studies.

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Suni and the Seven Princesses is a popular rap group made up of South Korean grannies in the 70s and 80s trying to take the entertainment industry by storm.

A group of elderly women from rural Chilgok, a county in South Korea’s North Gyeongsang province, is making international headlines for their meteoric rise as rappers. Suni and the Seven Princesses only debuted in August of last year, but the unusual rap group is now known all over the world. It makes sense if you think about it. After all, it’s not every day that you see a bunch of grandmother wearing baggy clothes and chains around their necks, and rapping about their rural lifestyle, especially in rural South Korea.

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