Cancer taught me a plan for more purposeful living, and that in turn taught me how to train and to win more purposefully. It taught me that pain has a reason, and that sometimes the experience of losing things-whether health or a car or an old sense of self-has its own value in the scheme of life. Pain and loss are great enhancers.

Everything in my life is in perspective. OK, perspective ebbs and flows. I've had bad days, but they weren't in the last years. A bad day is 2 October 1996: 'We've got bad news for you, you've got advanced testicular cancer and you've got a coin's toss chance of survival.' That's a bad day.

What makes a great endurance athlete is the ability to absorb potenial embarrassment, and to suffer without complaint. I was discovering that if it was a matter of gritting my teeth, not caring how it looked, and outlasting everybody else, I won. It didn't seem to matter what sport it was-in a straight-ahead, long-distant race, I could beat anybody. If it was a suffer-fest, I was good at it.

We are much better than we know.

I don't need a field of a thousand people. Anybody can tell you that whoever needs help, I'm happy to help.

If children have the ability to ignore all odds and percentages, then maybe we can all learn from them. When you think about it, what other choice is there but to hope? We have two options, medically and emotionally: give up, or fight like hell.

I would love to be in a place, and I may never get there, where I can help people. It's something that I never really cared to advertise. It got advertised. I still do it on one-on-one level almost daily.