I was going to start by talking about the Civil War and one of its most terrible euphemisms popularized by the rebels, especially between the months of July and September 1936. But I will be honest. A few days ago, to talk about that game consisting of taking over the beach by our elders and nailing umbrellas, I talked about the Normandy storming and those wonderful people who are our young grandparents and everyone was offended. In the case of a televised sport –the senior invasion of some beaches–, which has even had to be regulated by municipal ordinances, and, making a comparison so excessive that it could only be understood as ironic, between the invasion of Normandy and that of, for example, Torrevieja, this humble hack did not expect it. That there are people who are offended and who dislike what you do is not a sign that, a priori, seems negative to me, but quite the contrary, encouraging. Sometimes you explain yourself wrong. But the best is when they understand you worse.
But we are in a quiet period, especially for José Manuel Soto, so I will not write a word about the atrocious application of the Ley de Fugas and, yes, perhaps, about the similarity of the Summer Walk in the Afternoon and the recreation that is given to the Maximum security prisoners in the movies. Both know that they can walk but not run and that there is no way to escape from there.
Let’s go to analyze without further ado this sport, one of the most popular of our summers. To practice this, the participating teams are made up of family teams, sometimes made up of players who still do not want to participate or who have even been punished for doing so –another of the similarities with prisoners, for example, from Sing-Sing and even in Louisiana, with chains on their feet if any angry reader had any relatives in Sing-Sing or Louisiana, let them know that I do not apologize).
Be that as it may, today’s summer sport consists of short-intensity walks –never more than 5 kilometers/hour–, throughout the length and breadth of forests, parks, but especially along urbanized seasides, which sporting use has finished by giving the name of the activity: Paseo Marítimo. The first to urbanize and beautify the city would be those of Santander and San Sebastián at the end of the 19th century. And it is that taking care of the coast has not had so many years and only from the interest of the aristocracy for what was called wave baths, did they begin to value that part of the geography of this country.
One aspect that differentiates the Afternoon Summer Walk from other sports is that it is practiced through matches that you never know when they start and when they end, a bit like spy dates in occupied Berlin: only they know but they are always on time. The different teams go to the field of play when they want and for as long as they want, but always in the afternoon, when the sun is not directly blazing and never if it rains. There is no starting or finishing line, and, in reality, that destroys the little competitive enthusiasm for this sport.
A Summer Summer Walk is not a sprint or a marathon, although it is one of obstacles –manteros, other participants, bicycles, skates and annoying people–. There are no specialists in this sport beyond a series of sprinter children who start running but are quickly absorbed by the always slow and jogging peloton. Because the unprecedented thing about this sport is that it is practiced by teams that do not compete with each other. That in fact, they act as if the others did not exist and had not had the same occurrence as them. It is a sport whose purpose is to kill time, to make the hours go by as if it did not matter to lose them in an activity with the sea to the right when going and to the left, when returning.
The motor of this sport, you will have already discovered, is the most terrible of tedium and boredom. It is practiced because one – in this case, a family – is already bored before practicing it. In a certain way, it is about reducing the unbearable frequency of boredom, or doing it in motion, always forward but nowhere like the jelly animals of the abyssal depths of the oceans.
As a sport it is certainly soporific, I am not going to deny it, despite the fact that its practice can be done after a nap. Fathers, mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers, children, adolescents, friends of these. Many of them inside bodies reddened by excessive hours in the sun that same morning –and the one before and the one before the previous one–. A small apartment for so many people –two sitting at the dining room table, three in the dining room, four in the bedrooms, two in the kitchen and Uncle Pau on the balcony. A latent conflict with adolescents and between adolescents. The Karamazov brothers aged nine, ten and twelve. The brothers-in-law Macbeth and uncle Pitingo. That promise to put your kids on thirty zip lines and go bankrupt. In short, a horror and the need for something to happen between lunch and dinner that is not the usual, although that something is always the same something, leading him to play a tournament on the Paseo Marítimo, where he will run into other entities relatives with identical motivations.
As a novel factor would be the possibility that the team can be made up of humans and animals, especially dogs and carts with children. The footwear –of humans– goes from the sandal, flip flop or sports shoe. The t-shirt or polo is usually a little less humiliating than those worn in the morning. No stimulants are prescribed, but given the After Sun aroma that emanates from the skin of many of the participants, it is possible that it works as such or perhaps anabolic. On many occasions, players are rewarded with ice creams, chocolate shakes and lemon slushies. Except for that, the sensation is always similar to that of the melancholy of beings deprived of liberty but with the right to outdoor recreation who know that they will never be able to escape from that family, from that social class, on vacations like these for the rest of their lives. .
