My running story begins with a movie. A few years ago, I happened to see Dziga Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera,” which became the decisive impetus for me to go out for a run again and again.
I remember looking, without blinking, at the successive shots of synchronized movements of swimmers, broad sweeps of the javelin thrower in slow motion, ultra-fast manipulations with the ball by soccer players, and could not believe that sports could be the source of such exciting beauty.
The final illumination came with the scene of the flow of the hurdle runners – those intense, endlessly beautiful, almost ethereal in their honed movement bodies sweeping in a solid line in front of the camera.
During one of my first runs in Dakar, after about 20 minutes of leisurely jogging along the waterfront without much enthusiasm or energy, I was already beginning to slow down with the thought of “not my day.”
And then I turn my head, look at the ocean, and suddenly I realize that the rhythm of the music playing in my headphones perfectly lends itself to the waves of the ocean. The spray of water crashing on the rocks matches the notes of my favorite John Maus song with some incredible precision, as if they were dancing to it on purpose!
Then I look under my feet and see that I, too, am beginning to speed up and slow down in time with the music and the waves. I am filled with energy and no sooner do I come to grips with the magic, the perfection and the fragility of everything that is happening to me than I am surrounded by a group of other runners.
We begin to run at the same level, they gradually speed up, and so do I, repeating exactly without any effort and without a trace of fatigue the movements of their arms and legs, honed and rhythmic, like the athletes in a Vertov film. By that time dusk had already fallen, and I could see only the reflections of sweat and arteries swollen with tension on their faces, everything else had become a defocused background.
From the aesthetic pleasure and awareness of my participation in it, I catch myself thinking about the cinematic nature of this scene. My heart leaps out of my chest with excitement, and suddenly someone in a rush of adrenaline begins to emit almost animalistic screams of joy from running. We all pick him up and, without collusion, run into the ocean together.
I have never felt such intoxication from running, such closeness to total strangers, such a collective body experience. Those few minutes of pure happiness opened up a new level of training for me. In Dakar, I realized that running can be a very cool experience of living a shared emotion and being one with others.
The fact that it happened to me specifically in Senegal is certainly no coincidence.
In a society in which the group is much higher than the individual in the system of values, and sometimes very unexpected rituals for the European man are brought out into the street, training alone is a practice, to say the least, strange.