OPINION PIECE - His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy. No, this is not the first verse of rapper Eminem's Lose Yourself, but rather the state I was in five minutes into my first run in six weeks.

So, the government relented a little bit (like, 3%) and finally let South Africans out of their cages (if only for three hours of the day), with some rather interesting and beautiful creatures reappearing out of the shadows. Prior to the lockdown, everyone always poked fun at runners, walkers, and cyclists because they thought these people were absolutely mental to just exercise with no real aim. Exercising simply because they enjoy exercising. Heck, I was one of them at one stage. But luckily I was converted a month or so prior to lockdown. Some of the non-exercise fans might have even gone so far as to occasionally say, "You'll catch me exercising like that over my dead body", or something along those lines.

Well, well, well, now that we're in Level 4, what do we have here? The non-exercisers doing the one thing they swore they'd never do. They're out and about, walking, running, cycling. Why? Well, simply because they can. Turns out, thankfully, it didn't quite take a visit from archangel Azrael to get going, but a month-and-a-bit of being cooped up in their homes was good enough to do the trick. When I ventured out into the wide open on the morning of Friday 1 May for my first 5km run in six weeks, I was not prepared for what lay ahead.

As mentioned earlier, only five minutes into my run my body was already telling me we've run enough and it is now time to go back home. But I'm glad I went on, and whether it was my inability to get some sort of rhythm going and actually feel fit again, or the spectacle that lay before me, I was properly taken aback. There was every kind of person out doing exercise. People who have always exercised, people who were behind on their training prior to lockdown, people who swore off exercise when they finished high school, and people who never did any form of exercise.

But regardless of whether they were running in exercise clothing or walking in pyjamas, nobody was too tired to pop a smile, a wave, or a simple nod of the head. I've always maintained that Knysna's people are some of the friendliest and social I've met, but this was something new, something different. There was a sense of humanity and purity that has never been there before, almost an unspoken mutual understanding of, "Hey, we've been locked down together even though apart, and we feel each other's pain. Keep going".

This was beautiful to behold. To think it took a worldwide pandemic and a nationwide lockdown to rekindle our shared humanity… Priceless.