Jogging may be bad for you – but Lew is a good old sport

I’VE said it before: if ever I feel the urge to exercise coming on, I lie down until it passes. That’s not to belittle those who love to run. It’s just that I’ve never been keen on the idea of jogging. Traffic fumes, the possibility of getting something called shin splints, or being run over, or twisting an ankle on a dodgy pavement, not to mention horror stories about internal organs moving around – it sounds a positively dangerous pursuit.
But pounding the streets of Derby has apparently never harmed a wonderful character who celebrates his 96th birthday next month. In fact, Lew Patrick, a stalwart of Derby and County Athletic Club – now Derby AC – when it boasted some of Britain’s finest athletes, was still running every day until he was 83. So what do I know?
When I was a lad, Lew was a familiar figure on his training runs in our neighbourhood. However, unlike some veteran athletes – they know who they are – Lew is no self-publicist. His own trumpet remains defiantly unblown. But I think that Derby AC should strike a medal for him. Not that he’s short of a few after a sporting career that spanned 70 years.
He was 14 when he went to work at the Carriage and Wagon, alongside Jack Winfield, an English international three-miler, who one day invited him to try out for Derby and County AC at its headquarters at the Wagon and Horses on Ashbourne Road. Lew was soon representing the Midland Counties AAA against Combined Universities in a cross-country event.
He was also a good footballer, turning out for Second Division Bury’s reserve team: “They offered me professional terms, but I was earning more at the railway works. And it would have cost me my amateur status in athletics. I wouldn’t have been allowed to compete.”
In these days of Usain Bolt’s huge earning power, that’s hard to imagine. But instead of big bucks, “shamateurism” was rife, according to Lew: “Athletes would sell or pawn their trophies – gold watches, canteens of cutlery, silver cups. Work was scarce, people were on the breadline – you couldn’t blame them for looking after their families.”
He has a fund of stories, including the time a well-known runner from Derby took £100 from a bookmaker to throw a race. Lew won’t tell me his name in case relatives are still about.
For many years, he performed semi-professionally in a Derby dance band, swam, played bowls, and made his own wine. It’s the wine that I remember most. I rarely walked past his house in Harcourt Street without him knocking on the window to invite me in for a tasting. It was good stuff, too. I usually went home slightly more confused then when I’d arrived – “squiffy”, as my dear old Aunt Ivy used to say.
Silver birch sap was a particularly good drink. Or it might have been parsnip and passion fruit. I told you I was confused.
Thirteen years ago, he suffered a mild stroke and his doctor advised him to stop, even though he’d just won a veterans’ half-marathon. “I’ve been running since my early teens. I can’t imagine giving it up,” he told me then. But he accepted the inevitable: “I suppose, if you have any sense, you follow doctor’s orders.”
As Lew says: “You only get one life and one body – make the most of both.” And coming from a man who didn’t run his first marathon until he had passed retirement age, it seems sound advice.
Having said that, if you’ll excuse me, I’m now going for that lie down. After I’ve raised a glass of wine to Lew Patrick. Homemade, of course.