Select 14 – Like in a tango.
Running, each one goes with his own head, thoughts and soundtrack. It is perhaps the mechanism that one finds to suffer less, to escape from the world or to motivate oneself to continue. Someone will remember “Welcome to the jungle”, another will think of “Candela” by Buenavista Social Club, there will be no lack of someone who will hear an insufferable “tumpa-tumpa”. For a few weeks now, I have had a tango resonating in my internal dialogue whose name I will try to avoid until the last line. So, in one of those, we both survived this whole story.
The song says that the “blinking of the lights marks the return.” The race was at night, and lanterns marked the route, and the city lights, dim or bright, yellow or white, decorated the asphalt and the sidewalks. Voices also appeared in unison repeating “let's go” like war songs, like overflowing nerves, like invisible pushes charged with energy.
And “under the mocking gaze of the stars”, in a March that was not just any March, we were given an in-person athletics race. As if it were the beginning of the end of these months that we will remember as those strange dreams from which we wake up without knowing very clearly if it was a nightmare or something nice. The sky on Saturday will be able to tell that the sweat, the nerves, the strides and the heat of 80 amateur athletes met again to review what it feels like to compete with other shoulders at your side, with the countdown of the public and with the tape reserved for the one who reaches the finish line first.
We will have to pause to thank those who organized and ran virtual activities. It was nice, yes. But the “like” or the “kudo” do not embrace us like friends do at the end of the road. Thank you for being the scene in which we were able to not go so crazy in the middle of a time that was on the verge of, paraphrasing the tango, “silvering our temples.”
We saw again the anxious jumps of the rivals before the start, the fashionable sneakers, the one who likes to wear armbands, the crying of the one who had a bad night, the guy giving himself a blessing at the start, the coach encouraging each lap, the family with the dog, the kiss at the end, the water bags on the ground and the backs that pass or are passed. Selecto 14, and those who created it, took us back there, to that place that was missed and for which we prepared between confinements, masks, runs in improvised places and uncertainty.
Hopefully, this is the beginning of the end. And if not, let us celebrate for five minutes that there was a race in person, created for people who go through life in strides and who, as if it were a luxurious gala, attended the event with all the pomp to leave their breath in 10 kilometers of demand, pain, tremors and happiness. Those who ran, those who saw it, those who invented it won a game against this pandemic that took so much from us.
It is also worth talking about the purely sporting aspect. It was a competition made for Agile and brave runners; the one that could be entered with the record of having covered the ten kilometers in less than 48 minutes. A meeting for people with fast legs and heart. In the men's race, the first one stopped the clock at 34 minutes and in the women's race, the winner did the same at 42 minutes. God knows what song will be playing in those fast heads.
For now I know that, like the name of the tango, we knew how to return, to run again with all its letters.
Cristian Marín-Alternating Current.