On the dangers of talking to the Press

 I was rather proud of my Derwentwater 10 mile road race result and thought it merited a paragraph in the Athletics column of our local newspaper so I sent a brief email to them because I’d also found out that beating nearly half the field in 1.21.21 had taken me to the top of the official British MV75 Road Race Rankings which means I'm currently the fastest man of my age in Britain over ten miles and I enclosed a picture of the legendary Kenny Stuart presenting me with a prize for this achievement which I was also very proud of because it isn’t very often someone who’s 78 years old is honoured in this way and the Prats Press must have thought so too because they wanted me to ring this man of theirs with more details so he could do a story about this but I said I didn’t want to talk to this man because I’m not very good at talking to people so I sent a link to my Blog from which I said he could glean as much information as he needed for a cracking good story but he didn’t think that was a very good idea and insisted I phone him because it was urgent and there was nothing to be frightened of so very reluctantly I did phone this man and he asked me all sorts of questions but my answers obviously weren't very important or newsworthy because when the story came out the following day he’d written a whole lot of nonsense that was totally different from things I’d told him and which said I was the top fell runner in Britain after running very fast round Derwentwater but that race wasn’t a fell race at all because I’d run all the way on the road and haven't actually competed in a fell race for over twelve months and he also said I’d won countless fell championships in the past but that was a load of tosh because I’ve only ever won one Fell Championship and that was in 2004 when I won the inaugural English MV70 Fell Racing Championship and to rub more salt in the wound he printed a five year old picture of me running in the World Masters Mountain Running Championships instead of the one I was very proud of with Kenny Stuart who really was a top fell runner and King of the Mountains so all in all I was made to look a right silly old fool among fellow athletes who know exactly what I've run and won but maybe thought I’d actually fed this duff information to the Prats Press in which case I'm probably regarded now as a stupid self-opinionated liar who ought to be having psychiatric treatment in an old peoples home to stop me having delusions of grandeur or dreaming up make-believe stories and pretending I'm still a champion fell runner when all I really am is a geriatric top of the pops over ten miles on the road.