Hal

It’s probably been 20 years since Hal last ran with our group at Stone Mountain. I think it was his knees that eventually betrayed him and kept him away from us. Anyway, there was this one run during the winter way back when. We’d only run a couple of miles and had a long way to go. It was a cold, rainy, miserable morning and we were quickly soaked to the skin. If the sun was up you couldn’t tell it. Nobody was happy that day and our normally robust conversation was lagging. As we were trudging along, during a lull in the conversation, out of the blue Hall says, “I wonder what the fanatics are doing today?” It cracked us all up.

We’ve repeated that phrase many times over the last 20 years. Whenever we are miserable due to hard running or horrible weather, someone will pipe up with, “I wonder what the fanatics are doing today?”, and we all laugh. It makes the misery easier to take knowing full well that we ARE the fanatics and our competition is enduring similar miseries.

Hal had another memorable phrase. One of the guys noticed Hal looked particularly pained in the middle of a run one day. He asked Hal how he was doing. Hal replied, "It’s hard to look cool when you’re throwing up!” This became another classic Hal phrase that we’ve repeated often. It’s applicable in a wide variety of situations.