Hillary and I are at a party in New York and this woman I don’t know says I have to come meet her friend who’s a famous marathon runner. I say, No, I don’t want to talk to a serious athlete … I’ll feel like an idiot and so on. She says, Yeah, but this is Mr X, who started Runner’s World and is chair of the New York Road Runners. All the worse, I say, and shrink away. I am shy around real athletes, as I should be.

Well, she’s not having that. Takes my tricep and duckwalks me over to me this tall, skinny (surprise!) guy in his late sixties … early seventies. And damned if he hasn’t just read our book, loved it, and he and I are instant best friends. Lovely man, too. Full of ideas, full of life. Lots of talk about older people and runners’ knees (a lot of older runners do NOT get them, he says)… the use of weights. And so on. Maybe he’ll write something for us.