While going for my morning run, I occupied my mind as I usually do, jogging along with some sort of bouncy iPod playlist and scanning methodically from left to right, then from right to left, in my field of vision. La berge du rivier was fairly crowded with promenaders, bicyclists, skateboarders, rollerbladers, French mamans pushing prams, and other runners, as usual.
As I passed one of the many half-pipe / skate park type areas, my eyes swept over a young man stretching with his skateboard propped up next to him. He looked like someone in kneeling seiza who had fallen over -- his lower legs still folded underneath him, but his torso flat along the ground, shoulders resting on the concrete, the smallest of arches in his lower back.
In the fraction of a second that it took for my brain to process the visual information, mental images shot through my head, narrowing around the look and the feel of the muscle the boy was stretching (the internet seems to indicate this is either the tensor fasciae latae or the sartorious, the flat deep muscle gathered just below either hipbone-point).
I saw a long front stance, the tension ripping through a room simultaneously; watched a girl mount a running horse, her powerful hips flexing to vault onto his back. The ghosts of fingertips gripped white-knuckled onto the lines of muscle standing out through my skin, felt the lengthening and resistance there.
I used to be able to do that stretch, to tip backwards until I lay flat on the ground, looking up at the sky. I don't think I can do it anymore.
Or maybe I could. The thought has stuck with me for the otherwise unremarkable and lazy day.
36 days.
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