"That day, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run..."

Distance: 21 kilometers
Time: 2 hours 1 minute (one minute, for God´s sake...)
Average Speed: 10,4 km per hour
Most Encouraging Information: 1277 calories burnt 
Personal achievement:  and a completely new feeling of knowing myself better.  

It was not before my body had completely gotten over the torturing experience of running for good two hours non-stop;

It was not before I had generously helped loading it with tons of chocolate, pies and sugar in the following month with two birthdays of my daughter´s and my husband´s;

It was not before a month had passed, 
when I actually felt ready to come out and talk about it publicly -
- my first and largest masochistic experiment - taking part in the Reykjavik marathon. 

It started at 8:40 am on a most boring and wet late-August typical Icelandic morning. I will abstain from the chronology and detalization of the events, but will instead share my experiences and interesting moments of taking part in that "most unnecessary and disturbing" (thank you, mom) event.

My moderately handsome husband was running full marathon (for those blessed who do not know, this means 42 kilometers of pain, misery, blistered feet, and occasional self-pity) that day. We started together and he, in a rather gentlemanly manner, was accompanying his lady the first ten kilometers, until, of course, he felt rather bored and got tired of, actually, walking.

After the first five, I got a recurrent thought circling in my mind, measuring the distance: God bless Drinking Stations and good people working there. This is the actual measure for a runner, an occasional oasis of life and hope, not the abstract kilometers which seem only growing longer with every step.

A half-conscious crowd sharing a common blurred state of mind, hardly seeing anything through the pain in the lungs and with the leg muscles dying with every step, can hardly be expected to observe the manners and etiquettes and avoid throwing paper cups under the feet, but miracles happen: a moderately handsome gentleman of mine was actually running with his cup in the hands for a good mile looking for a trash bin, under the judgmental look of his not-so-well-mannered spouse, until one of the cheering people took it from him. Apparently, manners are always manners.

People standing outside and cheering was the highlight of the trail. Honestly. Thank you all for being there! If you haven´t been at any side of the path, just try to imagine how all those people got up on an early cold and wet morning, went out with the kids and occasional water and pastry, were standing outside in the rain, clapping, smiling, playing music, encouraging us, to get over ourselves, to keep on going, to believe we can do it. (When I stop running, I,  hereby, in this piece promise to all of you - witnesses reading this - I will put up all my grumpy, irritated and sullen kids at 8am and go out at every marathon to cheer and support those crazy courageous people). Here and now I can only say, thank you. Probably, you have no idea how much it mattered!

Other words of gratitude I should address to my brave and determined step-son just only for the fact that he, in his teenage anarchic-nihilistic prime, put himself out of a warm bed at 8am on Sunday morning, went out alone into the cold rain and wandered for hours in the streets of Reykjavik with a camera, trying to catch us on the trail to take good pictures... Indeed, that day was full of personal victories.

A rather (believe me, this is just a literary understatement) lean Japanese man was running somehow around me most of my twenty kilometers - overtaking lazily and lagging behind for taking pictures of the most beautiful scenery and places that we were passing by, until he quite (again, understatement) easily and gracefully turned into the full marathon path and lost himself for his next 42 kilometers with more pictures to be taken with grace and ease of running. Speaking of the cultural labeling.

Interesting (I am not sure it was the exact emotion of the spur of the moment) it was to see the cocky sporty super guys running already back fresh and frisky when me, my pain, both of my lungs and each and every of my leg muscles were only hardly finishing our first ten.

Rather amusing was to realise that both feet started to blister on the 12th kilometer (9 km more to go). In my defense - I did prepare! I did read all those numerous advice web-sites about how to prepare for the marathon. I did put on my old comfy running shoes and all-proven professional socks. I just failed to take into consideration the high dampness of the day, and on several occasions in the beginning, when we all were still running in one big crowd, I stepped into the water and that irrevocably for weeks, for many a painful shower, settled the sorrowful destiny of both of my feet. The professional running socks, eventually, were the only serious loss of the day.

People show their true colours in the long distance running. Or is any demanding situation working as a touchstone and depriving us of the craftiness and pretense? Spending two hours with more or less the same people around you, one can see how different we all indeed are. Someone runs pushy, overtaking and stepping just in front of you, someone steps into the big pool and makes the feet of everyone around a wet mess, and someone (there was one guy) completely exhausted, sweating and already hardly running, who saw a glove drooped by a guy running in front of us; with everyone just passing, he picked it up and followed the guy for six more kilometers unable neither to get up to him, nor even to shout anything, but just carrying his glove.

Finishing the last kilometer with the rain in the face was not what a girl with a makeup on the eyes would dream of (you know exactly what I mean, sisters), especially with the full awareness that my step-son would be waiting for me to take pictures of me beautiful finishing. Nothing doing... Passing by Harpa (a national opera house) - a grandeur manifestation of the small and proud nation´s self-consciousness - encouraged me to hold my head high and whole-heartedly believe Christina Aguilera that we are all beautiful... no matter what.

I do not consider myself an emotional person to weep in the movies, on books or cute stories but going through the finish line, at that very moment, I blessed the rain washing down stuff from my eyes.

I did it.


Copyright © 2013 by Olga Johannesson

An Always Within Never

"Thinking back on it, this evening, with my heart and my stomach all like jelly, I have finally concluded, maybe that´s what life is about: there´s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It´s as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never. 
Yes, that´s it, an always within never." 

(Muriel Barbery "The Elegance of the Hedgehog")


Have you ever stopped completely absorbed by the moment? It could have been anything: a purity of nature, a breathtaking landscape, a stunning sunset, a pale sunrise, a piece of music, a line of a poem, a frailty of a flower, a tenderness of a bird´s singing, anything? As if, in this particular moment, we get the revelation of life, if only we could read through it...

Have you ever been able to almost physically feel the bliss of a perfection, a unity of the nature and a human, a state when everything around you and inside you come together despite the most disturbing circumstances, states, dispositions, griefs, sorrows, concerns - everything gets washed away leaving you cleansed and pure, ready to absorb this momentarily gift of the universe - the gift of being.   

...by its definition to make a day perfect something special should designate a senseless 24-hour existence or even a better definition would suit a chain of desirable events (to cover a 24-hour senseless existence) in such a way so that by the time one is ready to hit the pillow and send oneself into the oblivion one actually feels (for once) accomplishment and a positive attitude which justifies the meaningless dwelling and fulfills unyielding all-human existential Angst (at least until a warm encounter with a cup of coffee, appeasing with the harsh reality of the following morning).

My perfect day started at 5:30 am, with the sun still enjoying the nap, and my own daughter slapping me by my own pillow into my own face. As the weekend morning are primarily my duty to wake up before dawn with our smiling early bird, with the angels still sleeping, I greeted my usual 5 am friend, the devil, who was already dancing in my head, running shivers through my body and with a tender whisper tempting me to run away and join the circus (until it's too late and everyone wakes up).

I took the smiling happy angel out of our bed and let my lucky bastard moderately handsome husband watch his I-am-using-my-laser-to-kill-all-aliens-in-space dreams (I, quite groundlessly and naively, still choose to believe it is only scenario that is running under the warm cuddling blanket in the sweetness of early mornings since his age of fourteen).

At 5:30 am I went out of a warm bedroom into the coldness of an abandoned living room to face the unbearable brightness of being in the five electric lights with the demon of electricity (seriously, what is this thing?) snapped out into the human world by a switch.

And that was still long before God created coffee that day...
Or roosters had finished with the demons for the third time that lonely September morning...

Holding the thought of the roosters, demons and a protective happy baby in the arms I have proceeded to open the balcony door to see... an Eden - a quiet, completely calm, warm September morning - air standing still, motionless; thin salty smell of the ocean layering the gray transparent air, like the jasper seaweed curls gently threading through the solid waters of the ocean; and all was peaceful, still: houses, trees, posts. Grass, roofs, tarmac saturated their colours with the sprinkles of mildew and turned up ever so bright and sharp in the dullness of the air. Beauty.

I packed my angel into the overalls and we went out. We walked to the playground in the complete silence of being. While the little one was quietly exhilarating herself on the swings, tuned into the common mood of the nature and the city around (babies are strangely sensitive to the nature talking), I looked at the damp jade thickness of the shrubs circling the quiet playground and sheltering our bliss. Time stopped. We were in a parallel universe, standing in our quiet transparent world in the middle of the noisy and loud playground, children running, shouting, mothers chatting with an occasional yell for a bully to stop or a toddler's cry after falling on the ground - and at the same time - only me and my daughter, in the silence and tranquility of the damp morning, and a raven cawed harshly three times, flying pass by above our heads, pronouncing our fates, and us, blessed in our ignorance, incapable of knowing...

When we came back home I had my morning coffee. Many things happened through that ordinary September Sunday, none of them would seem obviously special. But the perfection lies in simplicity, and the beauty in the eye of the beholder, doesn´t it?

It is just about a beautiful morning, a smiling baby-daughter, a loyal husband, safe home, and a good coffee. And once, an always within never.


Copyright © 2013 by Olga Johannesson