My athletic activities began with, already when I was like 17; I was in very poor, miserable health and until Year 12 or something. I don't know what diseases those were, but I spent, when I was five, six, seven or eight, I spent weeks and weeks in bed and I remember well, you know, vividly, the village women sitting, old women looking at me and they were very, very, how to put it? They had no pity. They, 'This poor boy, I think he will die', like, I used to get so angry! What are they talking? You know, I will show them.
[Q] Were you very thin?
And when I went to school, to the primary school first grade, they used to call me 'skeleton'. So, when I was already 16, 17, with my brother we got a book on Jiu-Jitsu and we studied, read it and we practiced everything in Jiu-Jitsu and we started also, and then in '33, after the Berlin Olympics, that was, I was 11, 12 we began practising all the, all the things that happened in Berlin. But what we really continued was the running. We did one, we marked up one kilometer and we, usually in the evening after all the work and everything done, we used to run and all the neighbours used to look and say, they're crazy, running. And I think that that, activity, that special running gave me, my body a certain kind of strength in any case, something that is still sustaining me today. I don't... for the last time, you know, it's been many years that I had to go to a doctor was when I got married, because they required that you go to the doctor. And after that, I never went to the doctor. I had to, you know, go in the last two years, I have some problems, but I would say that I'm in very good health and, which some of my friends envy.