Steps

I'm walking through the mud. Thick walking shoes. It's about three O'clock in the afternoon. Everything below my hips is in pain. The forest around stands rooted in the ground. It's not only a dynamic whole, but every single one of these trees has a history of growth an losses, in many more ways than I can fathom. They stand here now, staring at me and my pain.
"Why are you doing this?"
With a forest around, answers seem clearer than among people.
"People have the weird habit to repeat the same gestures over and over again, even if they don' make sense". I explain to the trees.
"This is a returning event. The Luxembourgish organize it every year. That's why you see us passing by now and then. I come back to meet old friends and walk with them, and at the same time I challenge myself to do insane walks. I'm learning to let my body cooperate with my mind. But the real reason why I'm here now, is because I love the forest."
It's thought before I realize. I feel naked among equally naked trees. The next stop is close, I know, and I feel sorry to leave this beautiful forest soon. When I approach a pick nick hut, I see my sister. There's room for about eight more people, yet out of thousands of walkers who choose organized spots with bad music for their break, she's the only one who got it. About 8 km left to Diekirch. Now we wait for André and our Mom. Our motivators.
My 13th episode of the Marche de L' Armée ("The army stroll" ) is a sad one. Not only because I made the incredibly stupid decision to do the 2x40 km trajectory for the first time, but mainly because André split up with his wife, today's big absent. It would have been her 19th time, just like Mom, who is now the one and only Diekirch diehard. I also miss their daughter, who is hosting her mother in Holland, while my sister and I are treating our skin irritations with Plantin.
"Why are you doing this?" she asks me.
"I don't know" I answer. "Had to do it sometime I guess"
I force her to eat some nuts. We agree on forests beauty. We have a conversation about who is faster as opposed to who has trained for this nonsense, and after about 20 minutes we see Mom and André approach. As André reminds us where we were supposed to meet, we move to the next organized stop, where they sell the traditional sausage.
Because I have to take a dump, I visit one of the mobile plastic toilet rooms. I wait for an army dude to exit, enter and lift the lid. It's at moments like these that I praise myself lucky to have hung above holes filled with crawling worms and maggots. It smells like roses in here.
We meet Cokky about thirty minutes and three thousand painful steps later. She's my sisters 55 year old "not girlfriend", doing the 2x20 km variant but she voluntarily adds a few by walking towards us from where the roads join.
"Are you still wondering why you are doing this?" she asks me after we walked together for a while.
"Yes". And my focus goes back to my legs. One wrong step means that the next 10 minutes will be a careful rebalancing of my walking rhythm, in order to avoid the big pain in my hip. I should have avoided those reckless capoeira moves on day one.
The final kilometres are flat and straight. We walk behind a singing army group. All for ourselves. My sister said her pains are gone when they sing. They set a constant rhythm. My legs are to long to follow it, my breathing too slow, but as long as I don't try, it works somehow. We cross some people who can barely walk.
"Why would they do this?" I ask André.
"I don't know"
"Why do you?"
"I do it every year, it's fun, right?"
"Can't tell really" But the end is near.
When we arrive, we hear some people clap. Medals pinned on their chest. A strange kind of group feeling, Cokky calls it.
Finally, we can sit down.
Another friend, Dick, who did the 20, gives me a beer.
"Why did you do the 40?" he asks with a grin.
I look at the crossing canons next to my number 13. Everything hurts.
"For the cross"
A child's dream come true. Shame that I lost my mind along the road.