My pacer-coach⁴⁴

My coach, Pahar, ran with me today to pace me during the ten-kilometre race. I was running and he was jogging. Pahar is often my pacer for distances from one mile to twenty-six miles. But when I was his age I could definitely have defeated him. He is not an eleven-second sprinter. His timing for one hundred metres is fourteen seconds. In my entire athletic career I never ran the hundred so slowly! I started with twelve seconds and then improved. Of course, I was running without shoes — farmer’s feet — on a cinder track. Otherwise, my timing would have been better.