I was not an athletic child. I grew up in Laguna, where the heat does the cardio for you and the closest most of us came to cardiovascular exercise was running for a jeepney that was already pulling away. I was not an athletic teenager either. I was not, until embarrassingly recently, an athletic adult.
Then Norway happened to me.
I do not know exactly when it started. Maybe it was the first proper Norwegian autumn, when the air goes crisp and gold and everyone around you suddenly puts on hiking boots like they have been waiting for the season. Maybe it was the first time Babi suggested a tur, which is the all-purpose word here for any outdoor walk, climb, or vaguely athletic activity that involves being outside. Maybe it was the slow accumulation of long Nordic summer evenings where it stays light until eleven and you start to feel guilty for being indoors.
Whatever it was, I started moving. First short walks. Then longer walks. Then walks that became proper hikes, the kind that involve elevation gain and packed lunches and that particular Norwegian phenomenon where you eat an orange on top of a mountain and it tastes better than anything you have ever cooked indoors.
There is a Norwegian word, friluftsliv, that means something like "open-air life." It is not a hobby here. It is closer to a worldview. The idea that being outdoors is not optional. That weather is not a reason to stay home, it is a reason to put on better clothes. That on a Sunday, if the sun is out, the correct response is to be in a forest or on a fjord or up a hill, not on a couch.
I used to find this baffling. Now I find it freeing.
What surprised me most is that the movement is rarely competitive. Norwegians do not seem to hike to prove anything. They hike because hiking is what one does on a Saturday. They cross-country ski because cross-country skiing is what one does in February. The activity is the point, not the performance of the activity. There is no Instagram aesthetic to maintain, no personal best to chase. Just the quiet, slightly stubborn idea that a body is meant to be used.
This has changed me in ways I did not expect. I sleep better. I think more clearly. I have a different relationship with the weather, which used to be something that happened to me and is now something I dress for. I am stronger than I was at twenty-five, which is not something I thought I would ever be able to write.
I am still not athletic in the way Norwegians are athletic. I am not going to win anything. I will probably never enjoy cross-country skiing as much as everyone here insists I eventually will. But I have learned to love moving for its own sake, which I did not know was available to me as a personality trait.
If you had told me ten years ago, sweating through a Laguna afternoon, that I would one day live in a country where I voluntarily walked uphill for fun, I would have laughed. But here I am. With hiking boots by the door and a husband who knows which trails are good in October and a small, surprised version of myself who has started to think of her body as something other than a vehicle for getting to work.
It is one of the gifts the country has given me. I did not see it coming.