As a matter of fact ...

"As a matter of fact, I didn't know you had ever played basketball, or any other sports whatsoever".

My friend's remark did not entirely miss the target. Sport was not my cup of tea. (I'm deliberately using the past tense here.) Practising sport that is, watching it on the telly, couch-potating as it were, was an entire different matter altogether. Watching any of it actually, from football (American or otherwise) to basketball, from tennis to snooker (the latter among my favourites), from adrenaline-releasing F1 races to slumber-stimulating golf, to name but a few.

The exercise had to be made, and soon I found myself tracing back the elapsed years for hints of sporting moments in my life.

I have vivid memories of playing football as a kid in elementary school. In fact it was not proper football-playing but a fairly rudimentary approach to the original. To begin with there was no ball, whose reason I now wonder. Perhaps they were just forbidden or maybe a soccer ball was much too expensive an item then. There were no football boots or any other equipment either. The kids' desire to play was however fulfilled in a fairly remarkable way. We made up "balls" by stuffing bits of paper (from sandwiches, or from magazine or newspaper debris found in litter bins) into plastic bags as compact as we could. Each bag was turned inside out as many times as possible, depending on its size, and carefully not to disperse its contents, until the plastic surface of the resulting spheroid was stretched and smooth. Next, it was fastened with a tight knot. The ball was usually broken after a few minutes which was all they took us to finish a game in the short break we were allowed in between lectures. There were also football games going on in the street, usually in the afternoons, taking advantage of the low amount of traffic streets had to deal with back then, some thirty years ago, particularly in the outskirts of the town where I lived. I do remember those street football games were played with real balls which leads me to conclude their use must have then been forbidden within the school limits. Not wanting to show off or anything but I was a jolly good skillful player able to control the ball much more proficiently than your average player.

On saturdays, we sometimes used to go to empty plots to play games against rival teams from the neighbourhood. I still have mixed feelings about those: sometimes they were fun, sometimes they were hell - there was always the violent kid eager to start some fight for whatever stupid reason. Blame it on our zeal for competition and its obscure manifestations. Football kept being a recurent activity all through my teenage years, particularly during summer breaks. It so happened that near my parents' place by the sea I made a few friends which were all very much into football. Some even owned a federation license and played in local teams beyond amateurish levels. It was not rare to organize games almost on a daily basis, sometimes among us and sometimes against other teams from nearby places.

As I grew older and entered into undergraduate school football became more of a scarce activity. It was reduced to some occasional match on saturday afternoons with a bunch of friends from high-school. For a period of time I overlapped this activity with tennis, which I played a couple of times a week. However, I never really reached a decent level in tennis. My partner was always the same friend who never got tired of defeating me over and over again. In spite of this I did not grew weary of tennis. It is an enjoyable sport, entertaining, physically complete and demanding, and the fact that it is not a team sports is an added bonus to me. I regret the fact that I never learned to play it properly.

My departure from team sports started with tennis and became much more clear with cycling, which sort of came next. During the summer breaks I was no longer playing football but rather I started cycling in the surrounding hills using a mountain bike I was given as a gift by my parents. Joining a widespread activity favoured by locals I started attempting the riding along the roads ascending to the nearby hills, comprising 12 kilometers uphill from sea level to some 500 meters above, and followed by 8 kilometers of exciting descent. It was tough at the beginning and it was to remain a tough pursuit throughout the many occasions I repeated the route. On the very first times I ventured the ride I always had to set foot on the ground halfway to the top. Despite my perseverance it took me no few attempts until I managed to complete the ascension in just one try. That was a radiant moment, certainly one of those scarce moments in life when you derive enormous pleasure from the goal accomplished, when the effort and pain spent to achieve what seemed an aim far beyond reach finally pay off.

I kept riding my bike for a few consecutive summers (never off-season) until the activity just came to an end. During winter, and already in graduate school, I made the first move towards a timid approach to running, whose early practising reached its summit during the year 1994. In June that year I defended my PhD (running in the evening of the day of the defense as a brand new doctor) after which I spent three months abroad in Toulouse. My interest in running stirred after becoming acquainted to my wife-to-be older brother, a marathon runner himself. It was in Toulouse where I found the time to run more often, slowly becoming more and more interested in such a solitary sport.

It was also in this French city where I had a go at my first half-marathon race ever, an attempt which turned into a bit of a failure, as I was only able to complete half of the race. In retrospect it has become clear that my training was poor, notwithstanding the exhausting state I was in at the end of each run which conspired to make me believe I was actually going through very hard training. Upon checking it turned out I was only running 3.5 kilometers on a regular basis, completing a single lap along the borderline of a lake, which amounted to 7 kilometers in the strange event I decided to complete two consecutive laps.

My months of running ended abruptly in 1996 when my family and I moved to Germany for a long stay of several years in which I had little spare time left outside my research activites and my family occupations. As a result there is a long, blank, empty divide of anything sports-related in my life. The situation was to change in 2008. A book, an author, were to blame.

The books is What I talk about when I talk about running. The author Haruki Murakami. It talks about Murakami's long-term experience as a long-distance runner. Somehow I was hooked on the topic afresh and in October 2008 I started running again. And so far up to this very day. Nowadays I keep a strict running schedule: mondays, wednesdays and fridays I run 10 kilometers and on sundays I extend the distance to 15 km. About a year has passed since I started, and I've been able to keep the above schedule during the last few months. Running fulfills me plenty now. I can even say I need to run, I can easily admit that the time I spend running is perhaps the best time of the day. It's difficult to imagine what the future may bring but I can picture myself running for the years to come.

On November 22 I will attempt my second half-marathon. This time around I'm aiming at completing the race. Inside of me I'm secretly hoping to have it finished in 2 hours. But please don't tell anyone.

PS. Oops! I almost forget about basketball. Yes, I am nowadays playing basketball, but this has to be seen as a mere light amusement. Together with some classmates my son has been playing in his school team since the last few years, which gave some of the corresponding parents the initial motivation to establish a "team of parents". A done deal. It's fun, a lot of fun actually. Nobody in the team is really a good player but we couldn't care less. We have a trainer and are slowly making some progress. Fer, if you happen to read this, we train on tuesdays at the DSV. You just have to get out to your balcony around 8 pm to find me down there at the court shooting hoops.