I used to be a smoker. In fact, I smoked for about 35 years, starting in the days when it was cool to smoke. The days of Bogart and Bacall, amongst others.

I smoked cigarettes, cigars and a pipe. Not all at once, you understand, but almost. In my pipe smoking days, I was a chain smoker: I would be smoking one pipe, cleaning and filling another, while the third was cooling down from the last smoke – I'm not kidding! I had to quit that, because I had no time to do anything else with m...

Was it really a week ago? Here are the elite runners starting:

What about the race? People I spoke to afterwards said it was the toughest half marathon they had run. A hilly course (one hill was about 3 miles long!) and hot weather (record temperature for the day in Nashville). About 80-85, but there was a breeze. With the lower humidity (compared to here in the Houston area) it didn't seem all that bad, but there was a long dry section in the middle where I got dehydrated. I started to feel ...