Ah Spain. It was only while sitting at a shaded barbeque demolishing Argentinian beef and roasted peppers that it hit me. We were finally relaxed. All the carnage of previous months had disappeared in a cloud of charcoal smoke, well-cooked steak aromas and the plick plick of Cruz Campo beer tinnies opening. I'd gotten on a plane 24 hours after my last race, visited everything worth seeing on the Costa del Sol and exhaled.
Yes the sun shone in Ireland. But its not getting away. Its not watching the world cup with an 86 year old Dutchman drinking G+Ts and talking about DeValera. It's not meatballs and kidneys for supper. It's not a world of back stories by the pool.
And the wine flowed too. I can float like a seal in the pool as good as any. Sun myself like a hide in a tannery. But mid-holiday I laced up the sneakers and ran along the seafront. My mentality of reading and rioja gradually softened to a sauna run at midday followed by a cool beer. I'd run as far as the Marbella club, drip sweat on their 5 star carpet, then turn for home. Slow, painful mission accomplished. Then the struggle back up the hill. But passing half-cut beach revellers, bloated lunchers and the idle rich as I ran, gave me an incredible feeling.
Days later I found myself cycling with Carlos, a fine tri-athlete from Madrid. We tested ourselves on all the climbs, often over and over. Before breakfast. Istan with it's twists and warm winds, snakes and Reservoir. Ojen, Monda and Alhauren el Grande with it's Don Quixote hilltops and windmills. And once I braved the San Pedro traffic alone to climb the madrono, a lonely, buzzard-crowded series of ramps up to the heavens. I kissed my rented Bianchi at the top, threw the knees out on the long, sweeping bends and waved at the melon vendors on the lower slopes. Outside the exorbitant golf clubs stood Spanish gypsies selling small buckets of golf balls, lost by foreign golfers daily and collected up nightly. Sprints by the coast, coffee spin to the yacht basin. Ah Spain.
Of course there was a Paella cooked by the neighbours to keep us fuelled you understand....
The miles took away the guilt of tapas and of beer literally cheaper than water.
So I'm thinking of putting a bike together and leaving it in Marbella so every now and then I can exhale....
Late on in the holiday, bike returned, sneakers moth balled, I was staring from a sand dune in Tarifa at Africa only a dozen miles away. The layers of mountains that ran through Spain in folds...the Sierras...dipped at the straights of Gibraltar and resurfaced in Morocco as the Atlas mountains. I've been in Spain nearly twenty times now and last week was the first time I realised that those mountains are me. Are all of us. I'll have to come back again to discover more. Wanna join me?
