Iceland review - 2019, Page 106

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Iceland Review
Every weekday morning at the public pool in West
Reykjavík (Vesturbæjarlaug), Halldór Bergmann
– called Dóri – slips into his grey, square leg suit
and declares that he shall swim 1,800 metres (1.1
miles). He is 68 years old, and, also, a great mangler
of the truth. He swims only 200 metres (660 feet),
on a good day, but does not like the facts getting
in the way of a good time – and this may be his best
quality: his penchant for childlike embellishment.
It’s this trait, above any else, perhaps, that has won
over a troop of loyal followers, and why those follow-
ers have, in the spirit of his own whimsy, taken to
calling him “the Commander.”
He is not a large man, not by Icelandic stan-
dards, but there is something undeniably grand
about him as he rises from the waters after his
swim – chin up, chest out, goggles on his head;
bronze skin glistening in the pale morning sun.
Digging his toes into his flip-flops, he struts toward
the glass yurt that houses the pool’s steam room.
Three of his contemporaries (roughly speaking),
crouching at the shallow end of the pool – heads
bobbing languidly, up and down, up and down –
follow him with their eyes.
Steaming a while in the yurt, the Commander
confabulates about politics, current events, and
sports with his fellow patrons, while remaining,
seemingly always, at the centre of attention. When
the heat becomes unbearable, he marches back out
again, relishing the contrast between the muggi-
ness of the steam room and the cool summer air.
But all of this – the swim, the steam, the shooting
of the proverbial breeze – is mere preamble for the
marrow of his daily ritual; for almost four decades,
he has rallied them here, his troops, at the edges
of the public pool – come rain, wind, or snow* – and
guided them through a tightly-scripted regimen of
quaint exercises invented by, and bearing the name
of, Danish gymnastics educator J. P. Müller.
Müller’s book My System – which outlined his
personal philosophy on health and wellness, and
included 18 exercises – was a bestseller when it
was published in 1904. Promising to transform the
figure of the common weakling into that of a Greek
god, Müller converted the likes of Franz Kafka to
his system, whose physique was once described by
an Austrian physician as “thin and delicate.”
Müller was born with a similarly frail consti-
tution, but owing to strenuous exercise, and with
the aid of his system (which he developed to keep
his comrades at the Copenhagen Rowing Club fit
IT’S A DAILY SPECTACLE THAT ALWAYS BEGINS THE
SAME WAY, WITH A RALLYING CRY THAT ALL OF THE
PATRONS OF WEST REYKJAVÍK’S POOL ARE NOW
LONG FAMILIAR WITH:
“THE EXERCISES ARE BEGINNING!”