Run or Die (9 page)

As I lie there and savor the early warmth, my mind drifts to another shelter from many years ago, though I remember it as if it were yesterday. During a long excursion into the Pyrenees, exhaustion and twilight reached us simultaneously. Alba complained she was tired and sleepy, and I let her talk me into finding a barn where we could shelter and spend the night before making a brisk descent on Monday, before sunrise, to get to work on time.

Alba and I met in Barcelona, which seems paradoxical given that we were two such spirits of nature. I had left my soothing mountains to go down to the city for a stress test. At the start of each season, all athletes had to go to a clinic in Barcelona for a medical checkup to monitor heart performance and to ensure there was no problem that might prevent us from continuing our physical activity. For years my heart performance had remained stable, but each year I went down for an electrocardiogram. To see how my heart responded to stress, I would do the Bruce Test. It’s no Bruce Springsteen concert, but rather a run on a treadmill that increased speed every 3 minutes and was on an incline simulating an uphill slope. You had to run until your legs and heart couldn’t stand the rhythm for another second, stopping just before the moving belt catapulted you to the other end of the room. All of this while wearing breathing tubes to connect your respiration to the doctors’ computer and stickers on your chest to measure your heartbeat.

Although I hadn’t noticed any changes that year, my doctors persuaded me it was particularly important to do the tests this time, after a very demanding summer, because they feared I had overtrained and overstretched myself. The doctor hadn’t minced words: “If we see that you have overdone it, you’ll have to give up training for at least a month until your levels return to normal.”

All that had put me under enormous pressure and worried me terribly. Not training for a month would be like the end of life. What would I do? Unfortunately, a stress test isn’t like a race, where you can smile and hide your true physical condition from your competitors. Computers don’t lie.

In the end, despite all my worrying, the test results were perfect. There was nothing to indicate that I hadn’t recovered from my fatigue following recent races.

I left the clinic, light with relief as I ventured out into the hot streets of Barcelona. As my car was with the mechanic, I’d traveled down by bus and would need to wait a long while before I could catch the return bus to Puigcerdà. I took a leisurely stroll down the Diagonal to the station. I got there an hour before my bus was scheduled to depart, so I sat on the station steps reading the latest book my sister had recommended and finally surrendered to me after I’d nagged her about it. The novel combined life stories of several protagonists who lived in different parts of Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, before and during World War I. Time flew by, and I didn’t notice that my bus had parked in its bay and was now loaded and preparing to leave. As the last passengers put their suitcases in the luggage hold, I jumped up and rushed onto the bus.

“Don’t you worry, lad. I wouldn’t have left you stranded,” the driver said as I showed him my ticket.

The bus was full. As passengers arranged their backpacks on the racks, I went to the back and found an empty seat. Behind me, a group of young people about my age were shouting and shifting in their seats as they made plans for the great night out ahead of them. In front of me, an elderly couple was heading home from La Boqueria market with all the purchases they were going to cook for their children and grandchildren who were coming to dinner. The bus drove off as my thoughts wandered from these contrasting conversations to the book I was eager to get out of my backpack and resume reading.

All of a sudden, the driver braked sharply. We had gone only a few yards and hadn’t gathered speed, but one of the boys behind me fell down in the aisle because he’d been standing. The doors opened and a fragile young woman got on looking very flustered. She was slim and not very tall, simply dressed in blue jeans and a green cotton T-shirt. She was carrying a gray backpack hanging by a single strap.

I confess that the first thing I looked at when she climbed on was her shoes. From what people say, I imagine that must be the consequence of professional tunnel vision. The shoes we wear say a lot about us: whether we like to walk, if we value comfort or style or something in the middle, if we like to feel tall, if we’re all-purpose or city slickers. She wore white sneakers.

Her face was what most surprised me, hidden as it was behind long brown hair. It was delicate, very gentle and pale, and I expect that’s why she seemed so fragile on first impression. Her eyes were dark blue and sparkled with life; she looked alert, but sad. As she made her way up the aisle, her slenderness and small stature emphasized her fragility, but her arms and the muscles that tensed under her jeans gave you an idea of her strength. She walked
confidently but cautiously, as if she were out of place and not in her preferred environment.

She sat next to me—it was the only open seat—and as I bent down to take the book from my backpack, she exhaled and said to herself, “At last! I couldn’t stand a moment more in this city. Who would ever want to live like that?”

“Well, I imagine 6 million people do. Though I can’t really understand why either. Have you been in Barcelona for very long?” I responded.

She looked over in surprise, as if realizing she’d asked the question out loud instead of in her mind. Her eyes weren’t as dark as they had seemed at first.

“Four hours, give or take a few minutes,” came her reply. Her voice matched her build: gentle, and not at all shrill, more like a loud whisper.

“How many hours did
you
stand it?” she asked with a smile.

“Sorry, I have to say I beat you by a long stretch. It wasn’t easy. There were difficult moments, lots of suffering. I was on the point of giving up several times … but in the end I held out for seven hours!”

She burst out laughing, and neither of us opened our books for the rest of the journey.

As we made our way up through Llobregat, the bus emptied out and dropped all its passengers in the satellite towns around Barcelona. Our conversation was relaxed and pleasant, and we didn’t realize we were almost alone until the bus stopped and the driver stood up.

“Last stop! We’re in Puigcerdà!”

The five remaining passengers got off the bus. I am shy and have never been good at saying good-bye. The easy flow of words
I had enjoyed over the three hours’ journey seemed to depart along with the empty bus.

“Well, it was a pleasure meeting you. I don’t know many people who think like you.”

“The pleasure was mine. I don’t know many people who hate the city either,” she said with a laugh. “I’m just passing through Puigcerdà. But I’ll be here for a while. I don’t know how long, a few days or a few months. … I have to see whether I like it here.” She stopped to take a breath. “If you come down to town, you’re in trouble if you don’t let me know!” She laughed again.

“Thanks. You’ll soon find you like it here. It’s a fantastic place. And if you come up to Font-Romeu, give me a ring. If you like skiing or hiking in the mountains, it is idyllic. …” It seemed as though our conversation wanted to mesh, wanted to find words and reasons to continue, but after a few minutes and a quick exchange of telephone numbers, we went our separate ways.

I picked up my car from the garage and drove up to Font-Romeu. I spent the entire drive thinking about the conversation and debating why I had said this and not that, why I hadn’t had the courage to tell her that I liked her, that I thought she was fantastic.

I arrived home. Like every autumn, it was almost time to rotate wardrobes, to put running and cycling gear in suitcases and get out my ski kit. However, it wasn’t yet cold enough to ski, and there were still hot days when I could go out for a bike ride and cold days when I had to wrap up well to go out for a run, so the house was piled high with kit. I lay on my bed and started to look at the results of the stress test, but my mind didn’t want to digest information about oxygen consumption, aerobic and anaerobic thresholds; it could only think about a slim girl with a delicate complexion. I couldn’t get her out of my head. And then it hit me: I didn’t know her name! We had been so absorbed in our conversation that she
hadn’t told me her name. Now I had an excuse to call her; I grabbed the telephone.

“Hello?” I heard that same gentle voice and laughter I felt I’d not heard for days, though it had only been an hour ago.

“I’m sorry, you didn’t tell me your name! Don’t tell me now. What about telling me tonight over a drink or two?”

“Hey, great idea! Ten o’clock in the belfry square?”

I walked up and down the streets in the historic part of town, pretending to window-shop or watch Cerdanya by night from the Town Hall lookout point. I even read all the advertising magazines I could find, trying to make time fly by. However, time moved very slowly, almost as if it had stopped. Minutes passed like hours, and it became more and more difficult to ignore my thoughts, which were continually focusing on the moment when I’d meet her.

She was sitting on the terrace outside the bar, gazing at the illuminated belfry tower, her back to me. I watched her as I drew near. She was the only person on the street, and I could tell she was relaxed. Though it wasn’t quite cold, the autumn nights were beginning to get cooler in the Pyrenees and people preferred to be inside benefiting from the bar’s central heating.

I came up quietly behind her and leaned down to speak softly into her ear. “I’m Kilian,” I said. She got up slowly, still gazing at the belfry. She turned around and stepped closer to me. In the soft light in the square her blue eyes looked bigger against her white skin. She looked me straight in the eye; her gaze was calm and serene.

“Alba,” she said slowly and tenderly, inviting me to share in the stillness that her voice and gaze communicated. We stood and stared at each other, only a few inches apart. I don’t know whether that lasted seconds or several minutes. Time seemed to slip by around us but had stopped as far as I was concerned, hooked by the power of her gaze. My pulse beat faster and louder. I could
feel each heartbeat in every part of my body: my head, my hands, my legs. I felt as though my strength was draining from me and I was tottering. My legs were stiff but shaking, as if they couldn’t bear my weight. If I had carried on like that for another second, I would have collapsed to the ground. For a thousandth of a second my pupils deserted her perfect eyes and centered on her pale pink lips. They looked so delicate as her cheeks broadened into a faint smile. I don’t know if time was still at a stop or suddenly accelerating wildly. Our faces slowly drew together, leading the way for our bodies. My lips separated to let air reach my lungs so that I could gather strength. I noticed the heat our bodies were giving off. Sweat began to dot my forehead, and I felt as if I needed to take off my shirt despite the cold invading the streets as night fell. Our gazes crossed from lips to eyes, and my strength faded even more. It wasn’t only my legs that were shaking now; my hands seemed heavy and awkward, and even my lips were trembling. I began to worry that if no one came to prop me up, I actually
would
fall to the ground. She was the one who brought me that support with her lips, and then I wrapped my arms around her and lost track of who was supporting whom.

I will never understand how people can live surrounded by cement, concrete, asphalt, iron, and glass. It is difficult to find a single reflection of what the earth used to be like when years ago it followed its cycles without interference, safe from mankind. What happened to the water that ran free and cut its own paths between the rocks to find the best way to reach its destination, the sea? Or to the flowers that struggled to survive among trees and bushes, vying with other flowers to steal that ray of sun that would allow
them to show off their magnificence? Animals can no longer move freely across the terrain, are caged in by the man-made borders that now bisect their once wide-open lands. They can no longer simply follow the instincts to find shelter, seek out their prey, create their own hiding places in order to elude their predators—they can no longer live as they were meant to. And what about us? Aren’t we basically just another animal? Like dogs, cats, and parrots, aren’t we also trapped inside four cement walls that prevent us from flying freely, from being able to feel the human essence within us, the animal sleeping within that is waiting for the moment when it can wake up and run through a space of its own?

Our parents took my sister, Naila, and me on a hike across the Pyrenees on foot when I was 10. In those 42 days we discovered that we knew nothing at all about the mountains where we had lived all our lives, and that we loved them—though we didn’t realize it at the time. When we made that trek as young kids, I didn’t know that a seed of an idea had been planted in my unconscious that would finally begin to sprout in the spring of 2010. Timidly but firmly opening a path through the snow, that idea kept growing robustly until it started to assume a shape. Initially, it was like a fragile snow flower that was at once vulnerable and accessible, but as the months passed and it seemed as if it would begin to bear fruit, it began to look more like a mighty sequoia that was at once imposing and inaccessible—it was the idea that I could run across the Pyrenees in seven days. It had taken root so strongly I couldn’t shake it off; night and day my thoughts were about my trans-Pyrenees run. There was no going back. The mountain ski season had finished a few months ago, and the peaks were still covered with a thick mantle of snow, but the desire driving me to the Basque Country to start this adventure was so powerful that
rational reason hid behind blind desire and I couldn’t restrain my body, which was heading west, following its instincts.