At 90, he runs. And he's just getting started.

Yul Kwon beams like a kid when he talks about it: this year, he won in his age category at the BMO half-marathon in May. He also came in last.

That's because he was the only runner in the 90-plus division.

Until this year, marathon categories ended at 85-89. So Kwon, who is 90, wrote to marathon organizers to plead his case. They responded by adding a new category.

"It would be unfair for someone in their 90s to race against someone in their 80s," he joked.

Now, at Seasons Wesbrook Village Retirement Community near UBC, where he lives, Kwon is something of a legend. A woman in the lobby reaches for his arm to stop him on his way to the washroom and won't let go. He has been nominated for the community's "remarkable residents" honour. Running is hard, he explains. Moving through what is uncomfortable brings rewards. One of those is joy. He runs because he can.

Kwon wears clean New Balance sneakers, neatly tied.

He took up running at 60. At 80, he won his age group in the Boston Marathon. "Happiness is my priority now," he says. "At my age, I can see the end of my life. It's important to cherish every moment."

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Born to impoverished farmers in a village on Korea's southern peninsula, Kwon had no shoes until he learned to weave his own out of rice straw. The rice his family harvested was allocated to the Japanese colonial occupiers. There was no running water or toilet, and Kwon felt shame about his distended belly, swollen from starvation and parasites.

Kwon was one of nine children. Three did not survive infancy. "Somehow I survived."

His parents scraped together money to send him to elementary, and later middle school, in Masan, something his siblings did not get to do. His best hope was "the vague prospect" of working in an office. He wasn't sure exactly what that meant, only that he wouldn't have to work in the fields.

But the North Korean invasion on June 25, 1950, ended his schooling. He returned home. Luck stepped in again, briefly. "I was too young to be drafted," said Kwon.

Kwon's village was caught in months of bombardment between North Korean and American forces. His mother was killed, and the family displaced. When the war ended, his father did not have money to send him back to school. He was sent to work in the fields. Kwon decided to run away. His sister-in-law sewed him a backpack, loaded it with his text books and some dry rice.

On the 20-kilometre walk back to Masan, the grief-stricken child saw the devastation of the war. "There was nothing left. All the villages were burned."

Kwon began his studies again. To support himself, he peddled newspapers. "I was so lonely," he said. His father helped Kwon with what little he had. "He was struggling, too."

One day, a distant family member came to visit the tombs of the family. "He looked almost like an angel, in these beautiful clothes," said Kwon. The man was a professor.

"I decided then that was what I could be," he said.

He rededicated himself to his studies, and became a whiz at the abacus. Eventually, Kwon earned scholarships to university, studied economics, and became a professor — the trajectory he'd glimpsed in that moment.

Decades later, in Vancouver, the work of running became his meditation on those early lessons.

"I learned diligence, perseverance," he says of the sport.

Running, in Kwon's hands, is not speed. It's not competition in the way younger athletes understand it. It's the discipline of showing up, of moving through discomfort, of continuing when it would be easier to stop.

At 90, he stands as proof that the body, given respect and consistency, will answer the call. That joy and purposefulness need not retire. That a kid from a Korean village, who once had no shoes, can lace up clean sneakers at 90 and run halfway across a city — because he can, and because it matters.