29.12.2006
BODYTRAINING
BODYTRAINING
With the becoming of spring the weather got better and better thus making it more difficult to stay indoors feeling so alone and deserted;
all inmates gone out, either to work or to school.
Including my fianceé, Olof Anna Gudjonsdottir a legimate medic, who was working in a fish factory for the first time in her life, because yet she hadn't found a job as a medic.
She had promised me in a letter to come and visit me in March all the way from Sweeden where she lived with her parents and sisters.
She kept her promise even though she didn't really know what kind of a decrepit person I'd become.
In that moment I didn't realize the kind of courage that young girl showed when she didn't really know me at all.
But in later years I've come to recognize and respect her courage when she at nineteen, a healthy girl in the prime of her life decided to lay down all her former plans in Sweeden and come to Iceland to attend and support this handicapped individual that she'd only come acquainted with the last four months of her study-visit on Laugarvatn.
Many years after that fateful day in her life she informed me how her reactions had been when she had at last seen me where I was standing in the old airport terminal building, spastical and dribbling.
My dad and I weren´t as eager to spend our lunchbreak swimming as before and my walking was becoming monotonus, and in addition to this I felt that I couldn't develop my walking-style any further.
-Why don't you go ride on your sister's bike around town?
-It is good to be wise for others, I growled crossed at the one who had proposed this. At first I didn't like the idea of riding a bike, thus being visible to all. I'd be like some freak in town, because at that time grown-ups didn't ride bikes in town, except maybe "Oli the mailman" who has since ridden to another world.
Do you really think that I would like everyone laughing at my back riding a bike, and that a girl's bike?
-You might ride up by the Airport-road to the town's barracks in the moors, where nobody will be able to see you. There you could ride back and forth the tracks between and under the fish-trestles. You might even run a little?
To my true amasement I hadn't forgotten anything. I was able to ride the bike just as if I hadn´t done anything else. So fast even that before I knew it I'd reached the moors above the habited district and had the fish-trestles on both sides.
The adorable smell of stock-fish;
a combination of decay and money filled my nostrils.
For some time I rode to and fro on my sister's bicycle which is rather small, being a girl's bike, but it didn't matter much for the reason that I'm not any giant myself.
It's broad wheels enabling me pursueing easily the grassy trails inside and beneath shrunking, hanging cods.
Finally when I felt I'd reached perfection in the art of riding a bike I became bored and decided to find a new quest worth conquering.
"You might even run a little", I remembered someone had proposed before I went to my first practice-ride in the tranquility of the moors.
I recollected dimly that I'd never been much of a runner in my younger years.
That is why I became a goal-keeper!
But all practise would be good for my lungs, which weren't in a better shape than those of a heavy-smoker;
I was very short-breathed and had the most yowling laughter that one could imagine.
The times I had been told to keep quiet weren´t so very few, because whenever I had found something deliriously funny whether it was watching TV or in a cinema my laughter was some kind of a weak wailing.
A wailing that nobody tolerated, but I weren't able to do anything about.
My laughing and the reaction to it were the reason, that for a long time I only laughed in silence.
I laid my bike at the side of the intended race track. Having the hovels and the withered cod above and on both sides I prepared the run just as if I were a real track-runner.
AND THE RACE STARTED!
A few steps in my Pinocchio-way and that was it for me.
I fell down on the red gravel that covered the track.
My heart raged just as it was about to leave my chest and it took me quite a while catching my spirit that wanted to leave me dead.
-Wow!, I groaned when I had regained myself at last.
Obviously I'm not ready for this major break-through!
My head turned when I'd tumbled on my feet, but when I'd collected myself at last I mounted my bike again and went straight home to mother.
°
Eventhough I´d decided never to run again I´d returned to the moors the morning after trying to run amongst the dry fish.
For many days the effort was quite desperate, but...
-You´re not giving in, boy!
Don´t you realize that if there is a will there is a way!
Just look at your dad.
Would you believe it if I told you that as a child he had to walk with crutches, but he didn't want to submit to such a cribbled life.
No, not your father!
He played soccer with his friends;
was a goal-keeper with the aid of his crutches and he was a full member of the team.
As a teenager he started doing the Atlas-drills and still does occasionally.
Push-ups each morning and still he's quite fit as you have noticed, not an ounce of unwellcomed fat on his body.
My mother's lecture influenced me in a good way.
Of course I decided not to surrender, and as a bonus I was aimed to lose the extra weight that had gathered on my weak body in the easy living these last months.
I started making push-ups in the morning and have done to this day with pauses now and then.
The following day I had returned underneath the stock-fish hanging in the hovels in the moors and I ran and I ran.
I made progress each day in my running until I got a job at the Mail-Office that summer and thus the running trips became fewer and fewer, but I´ve tried to stay fit riding the bike as often as I´m able to.