Eighty eight year-old Bay of Plenty athlete Eric de Latour has a busy race card for the Oceania Masters Championships in Townsville next week.
De Latour will contest the 5000, 1500, 800, 400, 200 and 100 metre sprint races and the 8-kilometre cross-country in his age group, the ABC reported.
De Latour said running comes naturally to him and he intends to keep doing it until he drops.
"I've run all my life but I didn't compete until I was 63 when I started running the Rotorua marathon," he said. "Soon I found that I was better on the track and my best distance is 1500 metres."
He competes in the M85 grade and holds national titles from 800m to 10,000m. In 2007 he won two gold medals in the M85 grade of the world masters athletics championships in Italy. He recorded one minute, 33.25 seconds in the 400m then after a short break won the 1500m in 8min 11.60sec.
At the world masters games in Spain two years earlier, he won the gold medal in the 800m and 10,000m and silver in the 5000m.
NZPA