The midnight sun enables Icelandic adventures late into the night. See a video below and a midnight photo of my new home town above.
During a recent late-night (mid-day?) hike I met a 47-year-old man named Ingi. Ingi invited me to a workout class at his gym. I arrived at noon the following day, ready for some weights or jumping jacks or whatever an Icelandic exercise class might entail. I found myself the junior participant by at least twenty years, and I assumed myself the fittest. How naïve.
The clock struck 12:05 and our stout instructor bellowed over his microphone,“taka afstöðu þína!” (take your positions). Ingi found me dazed in the center of twenty Icelanders hustling to their numbered exercise machines, free weights, mats, boxes, and ropes organized around our mirrored room's perimeter. Ingi inserted me into something I might describe as a “horse kick” exerciser. He said “this one is hard, it works your gluteous. Just stay with Olaf, the Man of Iron. He will make sure you get the good workout today!” I looked left. Olaf towered over his shoulder press machine, bulging with muscles and veins. He leaned over and inserted my weight pin into the heaviest setting. Grinning, he whispered to me, “þú ættir ekki að gráta í dag,” Which I later learned means, “you should not cry today.”
Suddenly the instructor turned on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” remixed to throbbing German techno. “Byrjun!” blasted over the music and suddenly Olaf began screaming and crushing out rapid repetitions of shoulder presses at maximum weight. The entire room full of middle aged Vikings erupted in violent screams and enormous physical output. The people frightened me. I felt somehow transported into a scene from Braveheart.
When “skipta stöðvar” blared over the speakers, we rotated. I ended my horse kicking and imagined simply walk to the pushup station next to me. Wrong. Before I could dismount my gluteus machine, Olaf was upon me. He shoved me aside and began pumping out repetitions twice as fast as I had. This man was probably 50 years old. He didn’t stop screaming the whole time we exercised. The middle-aged mothers didn’t stop screaming. Everyone screamed. The music escalated in intensity and volume until “The Final Count Down,” remixed with war sounds, literally shook the mirrors on the walls until I thought they would shatter.
It occurred to me that the Viking gene persists here. Olaf wasn’t exercising with weight machines, but rather besieging them. Instead of tricep extensions Olaf did overhead axe swings. When we ran up stairs holding weights, I envisaged him with a kicking and screaming woman on his shoulder. His abdominal workouts only honed his pelvic thrusts, which he would later direct at fleeing damsels on some flaming countryside. While I toiled with the bench press, Olaf reveled in mauling the skulls of Irishmen. Our most talented film directors could not replicate the bloodbath playing out inside this howling Viking’s mind. Olaf's workout occurred on the ravaged shores of Normandy circa 724 AD.
After our 34-station suffer fest (and my complete emasculation at the hands of superior athletes with C-section scars), we began a session of very aggressive yoga. A core workout followed, then dynamic stretching. When it was all over and the smoke cleared from the battle field, Olaf offered me a sip of his energy drink. I pictured Olaf calmly slitting the throats of several goats and mixing their blood with whey protein and electrolytes. He said something in Icelandic, which I internally translated as, “Drink this for the courage to pillage many settlements and cleave through Germanic Hordesmen. It will give you an amour penetrating phallus and the strength of Thor, God of Thunder!” I declined his generous offer and opted for water.
In other news, my host family took me to a black market fish store. We purchased illegal fish balls (like crab cakes... kindof) and many nefarious kilos of cod. Iceland's fish economy operates through an elaborate quota scheme. Our "fisk" was sold illegally and without an appropriation from that quota. Every Icelander can fish, but cannot sell without a license, which this fish operation lacked. The fisherman's wife dries fish in a converted Pepsi vending machine, stores many filets in a large deep freeze, prepares fish balls, and even bakes delicate cookies, all of which she sells to support her family. I felt very sneaky. When she offered a recipe for fish ball gravy, I though about writing a black market foods review - detailing the illegal capitalist restaurants of Havana, the rhino horn purveyors of Beijing, and the fish balls of Akureyri.
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