When I ran my first half marathon twenty years ago, a friend of mine (whom I worked with at the time) also ran in the same race. It was his first half marathon.

He actually ran in on his thirtieth birthday!

I’m six months older than him.

I thought it would be good to reach out to him and see whether he’d like to join me in running the Bristol half this year. I’ve even suggested that he might like to look at fund raising – his sister died of cancer a few years before my mum died. From what he told me, her passing was horrific: it took her two weeks to die from the start of the morphine protocol.

He’s a little worried that he’s not as fit as he was; he has a groin hernia to fix before he can run again, but he sounds confident of getting that fixed. He was always fitter than me and had kept up with cycling, so I expect that he’ll be just fine.

We might enter the same race, but I don’t think we’ll be running together: he was always significantly faster than I ever was. I suppose we might meet afterwards for a bite to eat and catch up.

I do wonder if I’m being paranoid, because he asked how I was and I said that if had a bit of surgery followed by seven months without hormones, and then he went quiet on me.