My Running History

When a discussion turns to physical activities or sports classes at school, it doesn’t leave anybody quiet. In most cases, looking back on those events doesn’t make you wonder why you haven’t skied during the last 15 years. I still remember very clearly the turning point when I learnt that any kind of athletic activity wasn’t my cup of tea. Every year at school we had a cross-country skiing competition (now I honestly think that all sorts of sports competitions for kids under 10 years old are a product of teachers’ sadistic mind), but the most important one took place when I was 7 years old (that is, my first skiing competition). I used my sisters’ old and miserable skies, called “Lasagne”, and indeed nomen est omen, the skies got stuck in the snow and even when going downhill I needed to push myself forward. I was the last one. I hated sports. I hated sports for the next 12 years that I spent in the Finnish school system.

Almost 20 years later, I thought I could start practising for a marathon (isn’t this a requirement for any successful person in today’s society?). I was living in the posh 16^th arrondissement of Paris and my professor gave a programme to exercise for a half-marathon. I began with 30 minutes. My old sport shoes (yes, I actually had a pair) gave me painful blisters but instead of giving up I used a third of my lousy trainee's salary to get a pair of Asics. I obeyed the programme and increased the running minutes even to 2 hours. I ran in Bois de Boulogne, equally popular for runners as for prostitutes. I didn’t mind the swaying vans or the cars stopping to negotiate a price with the prostitutes, the wood was a beautiful place to run around. I wasn’t yet ready for a half-marathon when the autumn came and I returned to Turku where the cold rain took over my motivation as a runner.

I started running again in Florence with the suitable weather conditions. First I ran around the stadium with many other runners, but when I moved to the centre I started running uphill to Piazzale Michelangelo where I ran through the tourist crowds that come to see the amazingly beautiful view and the copy of Michelangelo’s David. The view was a pleasure for me as well and I have to admit that I liked to show the tourists that what they came to visit from abroad, I saw every day even when doing sports.

Running in Berlin was more like my Bois de Boulogne experience except that prostitutes were replaced by the drug dealers in Hasenheide Park. While observing the prostitutes and drug dealers was interesting in both places, in Berlin hanging around in some of the cool cafés was more interesting than running in general (not that there are no cool cafés in Paris, but in Berlin I could actually afford them as well).

Listening to the same “running music” playlist, I also got to some weird suburbs in Boston. When Rammstein shouted “Du Hast” in Florence, I was somewhere close to the river or running downhill through the woods; when I heard Rammstein in Boston I was following a long stretch of asphalt street that took me past gas stations and ugly apartment blocks. I only went jogging once in Boston.

Now, in Tampere, the same playlist took me to a supermarket, then past a place where we had scout meetings, through a field where they have built some new houses recently, past the hill where I got stuck in the skiing competition, a little pond where I played after school with my friends, to a playground where they have replaced the cool (and probably a bit dangerous) carousel (man-shaped, a bit like giant whirligig) with some boring (and probably safer) basic playground stuff. I had run really fast in the hot afternoon and at home I threw up. I think I will never run a marathon, instead, I think Nordic walking is great if only it was acceptable (or not embarrassing) for young people or in the urban setting (so far, I have only practised it at our summer cottage in the countryside).

Introduction

As the weather in Berlin is getting greyer and I don’t have the immediate urge to gallop around Kreuzberg and discover bohemian cafés and cool terraces, I can once again try writing down my experiences in a foreign country. Moving from Florence to Berlin was a huge change in almost all possible ways.

1.) The first thing I had to do in Berlin in early June when we had just left the hot and sunny Florence was to buy trousers. The temperature was 20 degrees lower than in Italy but it wasn’t the only reason to make my silk dresses useless: to be fashionable (well, this concept hardly fits here) in the streets of Kreuzberg meant Converse shoes, oversized glasses, badly combined colours, and no bras.



2.) The change in daily diet was a remarkable one as well. During the first week in Berlin we seized the chance of trying out Vietnamese, Lebanese, Ethiopian, German, and Indian cuisine. What an excitement after two years in Florence where you have to look hard to find anything else than Italian food. However, after three months in Berlin, I was happy to fill my luggage with fresh pasta, olive oil, wine, and cheese from Italy.



Also the vegetarian life can be hard in Germany; everywhere you go, you smell sausages in the streets. Once the temptation of sausage takes over you, you end up queuing in front of the famous Curry 36 in Mehringdamm. Staring the greasy sausage with slight disgust and suffering from moral repentance should, however, put to you back on the right track again. After all, the veggie burgers in Bio Buffet in Marheinekehalle are much better comfort food!

3.) Even if I haven’t even finished reading about Florence and the renaissance, I have set my mind for this new historical setting. I’ve realized that I won’t perhaps ever again have the chance to live in a such amazing city as Florence and be surrounded by its absolutely magnificent history (the overuse of these adjectives is not exaggeration when we talk about the history of Florence) but the presence of Cold War in Berlin is equally fascinating if in a very different way. Visiting the Stasi Prison or reading about the Berlin wall takes you back to times that seem almost unrealistic. Whilst the stories on the Medici family, Michelangelo and Dante illustrate the glorious past of a city where humanism and renaissance were born, the history of Berlin is often upsetting.

Clothes, food and history – in addition to them, I will probably write a lot about cultural activities in this blog since another major change to Florence is the widening of the cultural scene. I’m not saying that I didn’t greatly enjoy of the high-quality classical concerts in Teatro Pergola, but now I can choose from the range of punk, rock and reggae. And as the tourist flows get smaller I will start the more meticulous exploration of museums and cultural venues of Berlin.