PUBLISHED 11/01/2005
My English running buddy is grotesquely fat, and those cigars have cut his wind. When he says "Nazi," it comes out "Narzi." Nor does he listen. And yet the man's an inspiration. His signature line: "Never give in, never, never, never, never. ..."
"We shall not flag or fail," he told me when we were training hard together the other day. "We shall go on to the end." We were trotting on the shoulder and a passing semi drowned him out. When the decibel level dropped, he was spluttering: "We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender. ..."
Despite his girth, he's strong on hills.
Nor is adiposity his only handicap. My friend Winston Churchill is also dead. I often run with the words and sometimes the actual voices of dead people ringing in my ears. I'm clutching a Walkman or have an iPod clipped to my belt. I'm listening to books.
