Going running in Montevideo

My friend Mr Kemp informs me the optimal method of fat-burning exercise is light jogging. Around the age of forty, when I lived near some fields for a while, I took up running. It killed me. I’d go round and around a field I’d known for 25 years until I was fit to drop. The first lap might have been a pleasure but subsequently it became a torture. The trouble was the challenge. It’s hard not to be competitive. If I did three laps one day I’d want to do four the next. And so on. The most I ever managed was eleven. But every peak was followed by a descent. Sometimes you were back to three. It lost its charm. I moved. I didn’t have to run anymore.

A while later I was living where I live now. I felt self-conscious about the idea of running in public. I didn’t want people to see me suffering. Across the road from me was a gym. It cost more than a £100/ month. I couldn’t afford it. A year or so later, I decided my health was more important. Whatever that means. I joined. Basically to run on the treadmills. They had a device to measure how far you’d run and how fast. I started on 3K and built up to 5K. Soon I was back in the trap of trying to go faster higher further than I’d ever been before. After a Summer of running whilst watching cricket on the monitor, the enthusiasm waned. The gym remained across the road. Costing me as much as it taunted me. It was relief that I finally got round to cancelling my membership, knowing I was going away.

I brought my running shoes with me. It’s always a risk. Maybe you’re going to end up leaving them in a corner, goading you. The second day I was there we had a row. These things happen. It was one of those getting-back-together-after-being-apart-for-a long-long-time rows. It was stupid. There was no logic to it. We sort of got over it. I said I was going to go for a run. Which I did. It killed me. All over again. The row was soon forgotten. The next day I went again. I got as far as the disused railway station. Curious, I swerved to go under an arch and check it out. As I did so I pulled a muscle in my side. I had to walk back.

It’s cold in Montevideo in September. The houses aren’t made for Winter. The cold seeps into the walls, there’s no central heating, and it stays there. You wear layer upon layer. Everyone gets ill. I got ill. I got horribly raking-cough ill. I had to work but the only thing I wanted to do was go to bed. I couldn’t. C was on tour. In the days I wrote. In the afternoons I worked. In the evenings I shivered. I didn’t go running.

The play happened. I hadn’t been running for ages. Been to Rio and Buenos Aires and wanted to go running there but there wasn’t the time. It was November. The weather was getting warmer. The shoes beckoned. I started running again.

From out of the front door of C’s flat, a flat which basically turns its back on the street, you can see the Palacio Legislativo. A big, Italianate building, which holds the Parliament. Sitting on top of a hill. In all the years I’d visited I hardly ever went near it.

The Palacio was a couple of kilometres away. It made for a target. First I jogged down the street in front of the flat, Piedra Alta. Most streets in Montevideo run for twenty or thirty blocks. This one runs for two. There’s a ruined old car on one side and a pension further down. A sign saying ‘Ingles’ at the top. At the bottom you’re near the Palacio Penarol, a giant yellow building which houses the Penarol basketball team. Then it’s uphill, towards the Palacio Legislativo. The streets are nondescript but empty. Full of low level one or two block houses. A mix of residential and business. Offering a scrappy, slightly out-of-centre feel. The Palacio itself is surrounded by a giant roundabout, with slow moving traffic trundling round. No sign of any Westminster crash barriers. I got to the steps and paused, taking in the view.

Over the next two months, the running became more regular. I started straying further and further. I ran on Christmas Day and New Years Day. People has set up their barbeques in the streets, whole families eating outside. A man wearing a hat guarded an empty garage, fighting off the sun. People meandered. There were no other runners on these streets. These streets weren’t made for runners. They’re littered with jagged paving stones, dogshit, rubbish. The sun beats down and you head for shade.

Montevideo is named after the fact that a sailor shouted from the sea his excitement at seeing a distant hill. So the story goes. The hill in question, Cerro, is on the other side of the bay, far from the centre. In theory, the city is supposed to be more or less flat. Only it’s not. It has peaks and dips and troughs. Nothing too dramatic, but a peak is always a peak and a trough is always a trough. There is a Spanish word, which got used a lot in the Himalayas. It’s a word I can never remember straight away. The Montevidean hills gave me time to focus. Climbing a gradual but consistent slope, the word would infiltrate its way into the brain. Repecho. You don’t know exactly what it means. And you also know exactly what it means.

Round every corner there’s something new to see. Dilapidated buildings, crumbling art deco houses with a stone lion stuck on the top. A bar adorned with vines. On my last evening we finally went there. And drank beer. The waitress came from Mozambique. We talked about how impossible it all looked. C did. And I felt trapped because she was talking about how powerless she is and she was right. She is. We are. It is.

But that’s later and earlier I’m running, exploring, beyond the Palacio, past the antique shops, East to the disused building with the plaque for the birthplace of Florencio Sanchez, the greatest of the Uruguayan playwrights, they say, a hundred years since his death. To the West where the new Plaza has been opened, with the skateboard ramps and the landscaped steps and the small trees that people use for shade. To the East, past the railway station, disused, a statue of George Stephenson in front slowly fading away, the place boarded up, more Victoriana. Behind it the containers stacked up in Montevideo’s ever expanding port, containers from Europe and Asia and the Americas, full of god knows what, waiting to go god knows where.

I run and I run and the city runs with me, bright in the sun, desperately seeking shade, laughing at the gringo running alongside it, where’s he going – why is he doing this?

It was Summer now. The sun shone as I ran. I returned draped in sweat. Running was no longer a chore. To go running in Montevideo is to step out of self-consciousness. To step out of self-consciousness is to feel free. Really free. No-one’s looking or judging. No policemen in the head. No criteria. Just a simple goal of heading off somewhere and then returning.

Just like one of those runs, I didn’t really know where I was going when I set out to write this piece. But I knew I’d discover something, something which would help to lead me home.


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