6. Les Jardins du Luxembourg

    The title is not about the place where d’Artagnan planned the duels with the three musketeers in the beginning of the famous novel (I bet my daughter is ultra teased now and she’ll start reading the books, although she obstinately refused to read them in her youth, no matter how hard I tried, including borrowing them in two copies - one for me and one for her - so we can do tandem reading, all to no avail!). Where was I, again? Yes, after the lockdown…

    On June 1st, albeit timidly at first, life began to take its (new) normal course again. Restaurants opened, kids went back to school, travel bans were lifted, sport schools welcomed us again. Summer was looming, days became longer and brighter, all good ingredients for the spirit to be high. On top of it, tennis was back and so was the apres tennis. Time to see how the dilemma would be solved: was it love or just a flirt? Were those two months of biking enough to get me hooked or would I turn my back on it the moment I have alternatives?

    The first post-lockdown tennis game was wonderful. It brought back so many warm emotions, it was thrilling to be on the court and start hitting the balls again, feeling your feet dancing, your body turning, your arm stretching, your eye following the ball. Besides, you had an opponent that was challenging you, that was coming after you or defending from you, that put pressure on you at times and never gave up. All in all, it was so real! Don’t get me wrong, I sucked big time, as the lack of training took a big toll on me (and on my partner as well), but at the end of the day we both felt that life was back in our blood. And the beer after only augmented that feeling. For a few rounds! I could not but conclude that tennis is tennis. Full stop.

    Still, the day after, when the home working day was done, I found myself getting dressed and hopping on the bike, just like the weeks before. Music on, route chosen, and off I go! The feeling of biking was different. While tennis was more like “life’s a battle and I need to win”, biking was closer to “life’s a lovely journey and the only enemy is time”. Why can’t you have both? In the end we, as human beings, are defined by many components. These two seemed to me to be amplifying each other, rather than excluding. You can love both, you can have both. The dream of every man.

    And so went a great part of June for me. A couple of tennis matches per week and biking in between. Getting fit with social activities (drinking good beer and having lovely conversations with people you like) looked to me the perfect sporty combination.

    Then came the longest day …

    We went to Luxembourg to celebrate the summer solstice with the family who live there. Now, for those who don’t know Luxembourg: it’s a small country with a lot of paradoxes. One is that, although the country is very small, quite a few things are far from each other (you won’t find a swimming pool in every corner, so you’ll have to travel to it, luckily no longer than 20-30 min as you would exit the country). A real fascinating thing about Luxembourg is that, although it’s a stinking rich country and rather urbanised, there’s a lot of nature around, well preserved in a wild-natural way: many forests on some beautiful hills - quite different from the flat chested landscape of the Netherlands. By far the more interesting trait of Luxembourg is the harmonious cohabitation of three languages (Luxembourgish, French, German) and the way they study them in school, but this is not the subject for today.

    The hills and the forests, though, they are…

    For it was on a bright Saturday morning when I would normally go for a bike trip, only that I didn’t have the bike with me. Then I thought it was maybe about time to try again something that I had stopped almost three months back: why not go for a run? Indeed, why not?

I took a route that would go through the forest, with the clear intention to go max 4 km and then come back on precisely the same path (I know my orientation skills, especially when I am lost in my thoughts, all the more in a foreign country).

The first kilometre was very familiar: asphalt and flat. But, at the end of it, the hill was standing tall and steep with the forest hiding its real length. Just like the ones back in my Transylvanian childhood. And like in those childhood days, I took it with all my heart, lungs, and legs until I felt fully drained and could barely walk. Luckily I was almost at the top by then (after all, I was still in Luxembourg, not in Nepal) so I regained my strength when I entered a flat-ish zone in the forest. The ground, somewhat soft, was very inviting and gave me the feeling I could somehow just go on forever. I decided that I would turn back either if the path became too steep downhill (too afraid to injure my knees) or when my gps showed five km (let’s not overdo it). Not that it matters, but the gps won.

    I came back on the same route, mostly running, but also walking, especially downhill. And, for the very first time, running felt different. Good different. Nothing from the deadly struggles of three months before. I didn’t manage to run the complete route continuously, true, but somehow it felt that I could have done it if I’d just pushed a little.

    Maybe Pink Floyd were right: In the corner of some foreign field, the gunner sleeps tonight... No sniper came to shoot my lungs or legs anymore.

As for me, one thing left to be done: become a prophet in my own land.