On many holidays, like yesterday, they close the gym and then I go to work on my strength in the Bederrida park.
The place is public, it is in the university area, it almost never rests and it catches me a kilometer from home, so it suits me perfectly: I jog down the hill, I immerse myself in the park of the Pedralbes palace, I leave through the door of Diagonal, I cross the avenue towards the sea and I'm already there.
The Bederrida park is relatively young, like its people. They opened it in 2019. It is there where there used to be a parking lot for students or for those who went to Camp Nou. They leveled the land, painted some lines and come on, green zone (or hard zone) I give you: two basketball courts coexist with an indoor soccer court. In the corners, some ping-pong tables. On the perimeter, a four-lane, 200-meter asphalt athletics track. And in the background, two calisthenics areas.
In the afternoons, kids frequent the place. They wear tank tops in the summer or hoodies on these cool days, and they listen to trap while they score from the three-point line.
Whoever goes to the place has views of the Les Corts cemetery or the Barça stadium, which roars every day as if it were going to collapse, caused by the bulldozers.
When I practice pull-ups, I focus on the reflections that users, like intellectual graffiti artists, scribble on the walls of the calisthenics areas.
Biceps, Breathe and Read on the Wall Series:
“The moment you want to quit is just the moment you have to keep moving forward” (Anonymous).
The phrase invites me to continue, so I continue, there goes another set of biceps that I give myself.
Read more:
“It's not about whether they're going to take you down; it's about whether you're going to get up when they do” (Vince Lombardi).
And now, a triceps pull-up and, instantly, twenty push-ups. A superseries, they call it.
“There are diseases of the soul more pernicious than those of the body” (Cicero).
“Is the past a foreign country?” (Anonymous too).
“You will never be happy if you are tormented by someone else being happier than you” (Seneca).
Each of these phrases is a tongue twister and also a stimulus for thought, so, series by series and phrase by phrase, I am losing the sense of reality and immersing myself in a perfect ideal, the ideal of mens sana in corpore sana, the moment in which mind, body and soul align and relieve us of our miseries, and everything is wonderful and such until you come home and your car has been scratched.
