The human characteristic I admire the most is our ability to rewrite ourselves. Few things are scarier than facing ourselves. And spiders. And squeaky noises at home in the middle of the dark night. On todays edition of “What’s He Even On About ?”, me and my crayons draw a line between the above, Portugal’s geography and my dysfunctional relationship with sports.
Outside Portugal, I tell people I’m originally from Porto [district] to simplify things. To be more exact, I actually grew up in a small countryside parish 30km down river from Porto city, in the council of Vila Nova de Gaia. Roughly speaking, Portugal currently divides into districts. Each district then divides into councils and councils divide into parishes.
Gaia, as we there just call it, is a city and one of the councils in the district of Porto. It’s a huge coastal council that is bordered west by the Atlantic ocean, North by the Douro river and goes inland for roughly 35/40km. Foreigners don’t usually know the name but many have surely visited it.
Gaia is a 10m walk from Porto across the world famous Eiffel-architected bridge and is where the famous Port Wine cellars are located.
Gaia’s coastline can be breathtaking. Many years ago, the city council built a wooden walkway across most the beach line over 10’s of kilometers. Which is super nice for beach walks, early morning or end of afternoon beach runs.
Squeezed in the northeastern corner woods between the Douro river and the border of the next Eastern district, is the former parish of Lever, where I lived until past my 20’s.
Former because, due to the debt crisis, in 2013 many parishes were merged with other surrounding parishes for cost effectiveness. So the current name of my childhood parish is “Sandim, Olival, Lever e Crestuma”, which is the concatenation of the names of the four parishes that were merged: Sandim, Olival, Lever and Crestuma.
Crazy naming right ? I have no clue why they didn’t choose a shorter name, although as Portuguese I can “guesstimate” that any other solution would have resulted in nothing short of total civil war (uncomfortable laughter).
The larger part of northern and inland Portugal are hills, forests, some lakes and rivers. Growing up as a kid in the woods AND right next to a huge river was nothing short of amazing.
I spent most of my childhood and teenage years in the woods with my friends. Scouting for trees to climb and clearings were we could play some friendly soccer matches in Spring or Summer.
In the Autumn we’d forage for any chestnut that wasn’t nailed to a tree, plus some. We’d gather a bunch of fallen brown pine needles, make a nice pile in the street across our houses, throw chestnuts in it and set that baby (safely) on fire. Then we’d eat hot, burning, roasted chestnuts straight out of the fire. Good times.
My family’s place is next to a little valley that has a natural water fountain on the upper side that forms a stream at the bottom of the valley.
At least back in the days, on one of the stream’s choke points and far away from any street lights, there used to be a pond where at night we could pretend to be a Disney princess by surrounding ourselves with dozens of fireflies in the dark. Very magical!
We also spent an ABSURD amount of time mountain biking trails and what not. The whole region is super hilly, public transportation was short so mountain bikes were the most fun and effective way to move around as kids.
Sucky part of the whole experience was that, apart from exploration and the occasional risky swim, there wasn’t that much to enjoy at the river nearby other than the views.
Around 1985, a dam was built right on the border between my parish and the next one, Crestuma. My town is on the high water level side, so all its river beaches were flooded.
The only option was then to pedal our way to Crestuma for sandy river beach time. Upside was that Crestuma had, and still has, a rowing club.
I joined that club in the summer for a few years, mostly doing C1/C2 (one/two person sprint canoe). I eventually dropped out when I started high school in the city. These days I sort of regret not having spent more time on it because honestly it was a lot of fun.
Fun fact: successful international athletes like Joana Vasconcelos trained at that club!
A lot of the water experience I had at the time actually came from governmental programs. As part of the all our schools health programmes, every school Monday for the whole four years of primary school, a bus would come and pick us up for swimming lessons at a nearby public swimming pool, from 9am to 10am. Fun part was that I actually didn’t learn to swim there. And almost drowned once, oof.
We all used styrofoam boards as “training wheels”. One morning my hands slipped off the board in the deep water part of the pool and I had to be fished out, not before swallowing what must have been half the water in that swimming pool. I could never really manage to get off the “training wheels” and, as far as I remember, only learned to properly swim years later, on my own when doing river beach time with my family.
From an early age and for quite a long time, my dad also used to regularly yank me out of bed very early to go running the forest trails with him. I’m sure at the time I would have preferred to stay in bed watching cartoons. I’m also 100% sure I enjoyed it a lot, since I still remember quite a few of those sunny summer mornings where we could hear the pines cracking with the heat, echoing across the woods.
Unlike the couch potato I am today, at that time I was fit as a kite due to all of that running, swimming, cycling and etc.
Can’t recall if I was selected or just stepped forward, but in basic school, so maybe 1992/93, I was part of my school’s 6 man team that competed in the regional cross country school competition. There were quite possibly more than a few hundreds of other students. Me and another buddy from my team were only ones in our team that either finished first or actually finished the race, in 49th and 50th place.
A lot of people were disqualified for cheating (trying to “short circuit” the race by cutting under the path’s ribbons). I remember finishing the race next to my buddy, going over to the leaderboard with him to check our placement and that thing looking worse than Santa’s naughty list.
Over time I joined a few regional races but didn’t really end in any good place and was mostly for fun. Eventually also moved to high school to study computer science and started to spend absurd amounts of time just in front of the computer at home (gaming cof cof) and that was that.
Around that time I also picked up the nasty habit of smoking, which has been very hard to shake off ever since and it’s been a serious hindrance …
Fast forward a few years, at one of my first jobs, some of my work colleagues were doing weekly kickboxing lessons (teacher was registered with the Portuguese Federation).
If I recall correctly, one of them (Alves) had actually been Portuguese national champion. Extremely nice person. 10/10 would definitely not get into a fight with him either way :-).
I joined them for a few months, lots of fun, eventually dropped out in favor of late night uni classes.
Fast forward a lot of time up to 2013, most of which the sport’s activities could be summarized as occasionally hitting a swimming pool or playing soccer with friends and co-workers, I eventually moved to Edinburgh.
One day, while pondering the meaning of life in the kitchen with a flat mate, we both came to the conclusion that we were missing rollerblading in our lives. So we went out to a hit a sports store and buy some heels on wheels. We then spent the next few weeks teaching ourselves how to skate in the school yard across our building.
One free friday afternoon later, I decided to take it to the next level and went to an inside skate park. I told myself I would not leave that place until I hard learn to at least climb half pipes. After observing my glorious fails for a while, I guess the owners of the place felt sorry and came over to give me some tips.
Look dude, just get some momentum and when you’re close to the top, turn on the side and do the tipity tap toes until you’re the top and BOOM bob’s your uncle
It all took me several hours but I eventually got the hang of it and left that place as if I had won a gold medal. Life was good.
Sometime after that, for work reasons I had to relocate to Bristol UK. It is not the flattest place on Earth so the rollerblades were parked most of the time. Eventually I relocated yet again, to the flattest place on Earth, Amsterdam.
Since I didn’t want to carry another large box with me, I gave away the blades to friend back in Bristol and even after all these years I have yet to move my ass and buy a new pair. I’m starting to think that, sometimes, I’m really not my best friend.
The skating lessons did come in handy, since in 2019 I went to the Alpes with family for a week and had my first skiing experience.
The 5m crash course I had on skiing was basically my cousin and his friend telling me:
- Back straight
- Keep your skis parallel to each other
- Bend your knees a little
- Make an inverted V with your feet for slowing down and/or braking
- Try not to kill yourself
- OK you’re ready, go!
I should have asked more questions about the braking part since my first run ended abruptly with me tangled up in the security nets at the bottom of the piste.
Right next to a group of kids that were laughing and poking fun at me, because getting up ended up being less simple than I expected. The little pricks.
Still, I have never been a stranger to self embarrassment. While my feeling was hurt, my resolution was intact. By the second day, I was gliding down the green piste like I owned the place: slowly and carefully not to break anything important.
I spent the last weekend thinking a lot about all of the above. I also re-watched “Prey” (2002), a sci-fi movie about Comanche warriors hunting and being hunted by both a mountain lion and a Predator.
In the movie there is a rite of passage, for someone to become a warrior or hunter called called “Kühtaamia”. It’s a hunt in which the target animal is hunting you right back. Reportedly, with the prey sights, the warrior is supposed to tell the prey: “This is as far as you go. No more. This is it”.
As silly as it may seem, this time that got me wondering about my own relationship with one of my demons, cigs. I have been smoking for decades and it’s something that took control of a part of my life (and wallet) for such a long time.
Assuming that neither mountain lions or aliens comprehend English (or Comanche), it implies that the hunter is speaking to himself when stating that line. I interpret it as “to have control of my surroundings and my life, I have to control myself and my fears, so I can have control over you”.
In the main character’s case in the movie, she better tho. It’s either that or ending up as cat food or an alien hunting trophy. She lost to the mountain lion on a technicality but nailed the alien, so everything worked out in the end.
In my case, my hunt just began.
I haven’t smoke a single cig since last Saturday. Going cold turkey hasn’t really worked out in the past, so I have been using some “help” (a vaporizer) to ease out of it. This time, I’m sure, I will eventually phase that out too.
I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice … In my last year of living in Portugal, I attended counseling sessions for quitting smoking. The good doctor told me that the body can flush out the chemical dependency quite fast (matter of weeks). What’s left are then mechanical habits, which can be replaced with things like keeping a water bottle with me and taking some sips once in a while.
I’ve tried nicotine patches in the past but didn’t really work. It was also kinda difficult to keep that thing stuck to my shoulder, to the point I’m sure at some point I seriously considered superglue.
Not sure since when but, at least around here, nicotine supplements now require a doctor prescription. So I guess next step is ringing my doctors phone and setup an appointment soon.
This bad habit is going down this time! This is a far as it goes.
Addition is very serious and not easily handled, so no point in being too hard on one self.
But I’ve tried quitting quite a few times and always ended up falling back into it, making all sorts of whiny excuses :/.
But if theres one thing I’m sure of at the moment, is I don’t want to die neither from cancer, bankruptcy from the current prices of tobacco or an incurable condition of being a little whiny bitch.