I ran 10k today. A first.
It’s one of our last days here, in this temporary condo. I wake up at 6.45 am and have breakfast at the kitchen table. The birds are silent this morning. In front of our house, someone whose face is obsured by a gigantic hood is walking in the dog park. He doesn’t seem to have a dog with him. The river, the causeway and the meadows are covered in a thick fog. The house boats lie eerily in their grey surroundings. A bundle of light floats rapidly along the road.
Bert hates this appartment, where he feels he’s boxed in by people living right and left and above and under him. He says he can hear their tvs in the morning and smell what they’re having for dinner at night.
Me, I think I might even miss this place. Whenever I say this to Bert, he reiterates he defintely won’t. We’ve recently found a new place via public housing, that we’ll move into next month. It’s a 55 m2 two-floor house near the city centre in a low-rise building neighbourhood. He can’t wait.
I watch as the mist rises and dissolves. More and more cyclists appear on the causeway, all headed in the same direction, towards the city, overtaken by the ocassional moped. I hear a car door slam, then another one. Somewhere, an alarm clocks beeps. Pounding footsteps, the sound’s cut off. There are more people in the dog park now, and dogs; the first runners pass by. It might become a beautiful day after all.
It’s almost 8.30 am when I separate myself from the view and get dressed for running. I’m all ready to go, but I decide to do a little bit of work first, to get it over with; some emails that need answering, a project I promised to look into – just some loose ends that have been bothering me. Before I know it I get sucked in. At 10.30, I have resolved one loose end and gained five more.
I force myself to go outside. I run for over an hour, hit 10k, return home, stare at my phone for 15 minutes, do some half-assed cooling down yoga, shower, fold laundry, get dressed, stare at my computer for another half hour until I finally make my way to the office, where I do practically nothing for the rest of the afternoon.
There’s this recurring dream I’ve been having. I’m in Berlin, and I’ve just found out there’s a part of the city I’ve never seen before. It’s at the other side of a huge body of water, and you have to cross a bridge to get there – one that looks conspicously like the Golden Gate Bridge – and when you do, you end up in this beautiful, quiet area of Berlin. I’m there, and suddenly my friends are there, and we make plans to go and wander. But we never do. We don’t ever leave our picnic table in the sun. It’s lethargic and it frustrates me immensely. Still, I stay put. I sit at the picnic table and I don’t get up.
All I have to do to get going, is to get up and go.
I get it. (It’s not exactly subtle.)
And yet – I ran 10k this morning. I’ve never run this far before. I guess I should be more excited. But I can’t help but feel I’m getting good at the stuff I don’t actually want to be doing, and have stalled in all the ways I’d wish I’d gone.