Tomorrow morning, at my place: running to return to normalcy during Covid.
Milan, June 2021.
Summertime is coming. The city is getting hotter and hotter. Wearing face masks in the heat is becoming difficult. Everybody is hoping that they will soon no longer be required. The infection seems to be calming down despite the variants Alfa, Beta and Delta. More than 30 percent of people over 12 have been vaccinated, and the number of deaths has fallen.
Who is running tomorrow? I need a short but intense run.
@Elisabeth, what’s about 15 km no later than 7 am? The heat is unbearable afterwards.
Right for me too. And yes, the earlier the better.
Ok, tomorrow at 6 am at my place. @Germaine? @Adam?
I’m in, but let’s go towards the countryside, not downtown.
Ok @Adam, sounds good. @Germaine?
Yes, of course I’m coming!
The house is silent, Elisabeth is sound asleep at 5 am when the alarm goes off. Her youngest son had come home later than usual, and she didn’t get enough sleep. She is always worried when he is out. How reassuring the curfew had been earlier in the pandemic. The kids stayed at home, or, if they went out, they were required to be back by 11 pm. At bedtime Elisabeth was relaxed and happy feeling everybody at home, all together, enveloped in a silence that was so unusual in her city. She felt secure in her safe cozy shelter. But after the curfew eventually ended, her children started going out again. They are happy, but Elisabeth is again unable to sleep. She lies in bed waiting for the sound of the key in the lock. It is a sound she feels with her body. She then relaxes and suddenly falls asleep. It was exactly what happened also that night before the early run. Three hours of deep sleep and the alarm rang. To motivate herself to get out of bed, she tells herself: “Ok, friends are waiting for me, the silent town will embrace my running body, I will catch up with my sleep tomorrow: get up and run!”
A few blocks away Bob had awakened exactly two minutes before the sound of his alarm set at 5 am. It is always like that for him. He has a kind of interior clock that signals for him to wake up at the desired hour. He doesn’t need the alarm. It’s a gift. But his lack of confidence in his paranormal capacities makes him set the alarm anyway, and he always stays two minutes in bed with his eyes open, his mind empty, suspended until the alarm brings him back to reality. He stretches his long skinny legs and gets up, ready for an early morning run!
Adam too experiences a moment of suspension when his alarm rings. He opens his blue eyes and stares at his wife deep asleep on the other side of the bed. She’s used to sleeping with a hand under her cheek pressed into the pillow. He always looks at her when the alarm rings, and he recognizes her cute, slightly obstinate expression that he had loved about her since the first time they met. It hadn’t changed. “Sleep tight, my love. I will be back again after my early run.”
At Bob’s place Germaine arrives first. The streets are empty and silent, and she likes to hear the soft sound of her steps on the asphalt. That already relaxes her, and she needs it. She had been agitated, waking up often with thoughts about how the fight with her siblings blew up the previous evening. At first, they were calm and proactive in trying to organize the summer shifts to not leave the mother alone, and suddenly something went wrong. Her brother fell into a rage and started to insult both her and her sister in a way that she cannot bear anymore. There are few phrases that she cannot tolerate “Shut your mouth! You are an idiot! You are not able to understand anything!” above all if it is a man screaming these words to her. This is the case in which the always self-restrained Germaine becomes furious. And so, it happened. Now for a while they will not speak to one other, and when they come back again, the relation will be a little colder and more detached. They will be a little stranger to one another, and recollections of their past will blur gradually, losing memories of their affections. Words are like stones.
“Hello Germaine! Good morning!” Bob’s deep voice resounds in the street “You are the first one, very punctual!”
“Hi! Yes, I know. Do you know why? I didn’t have breakfast.”
“Why is that? Are you sure that it’s ok to skip breakfast when you are running?”
“I guess! I try to train my body to consume glycogen supplies, so I’m fasting during my work out.”
“Oh boy! Your scientific knowledge always surprises me! But what for?”
“It’s a training useful for long distance running. I’m training for the 100-kilometer ultra-trail in the mountain.”
“I know, your mantra is ‘Always a bit more,’ a wonder woman’s mantra. Believe me. I admire you”
Elisabeth and Adam arrive together. They had met up at the corner.
“Guys! Let’s head out into the countryside and run past the Abbey,” Elisabeth said, adding “the nice café there opens at 7 am, just when we will get there!”
“Adam, we were looking forward to this idea!” says Germaine very happy that she didn’t have her breakfast.
“Good for me, it will be my second breakfast!” says Bob anticipating with pleasure the tasty warm pain-au-chocolat that the baker maybe is already taking out of the oven. Bob already smells the freshly baked bread.
“I know you are unrestrained in relation to food; I envy you!” Elisabeth says thinking that maybe she already ate enough at breakfast, and it is not necessary for her body to add other calories.
On a summer morning, when the city is not yet completely awake and the heat hasn’t yet exploded, you can see the four of them, dressed in their colored running garments, a flash of brightness in the misty dawn, running in group with a regular pace and chatting about their lives. Boundaries, which normally keep conversation on a generic level, lower a bit and some breaches open. Synapses in their brains make new connections and what before was hidden discloses to their comprehension. Elisabeth understands that she must let things go, Germaine decides to step back and look to her relationship with siblings with a bit of irony. Adam accepts that life changes.
“Think how lucky we are, though in the middle of a pandemic. Let’s run and enjoy our lives, beating stress and enjoying food!” Bob says. Everybody agrees, and accelerate the pace, catching sight of the Abbey.
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