Running While Traveling
A habit that I did not fail throughout my time in Southeast Asia, is running every morning. Always the same distance, only less if my stomach pain was too sharp from what I had eaten the night before. The most difficult mornings were the ones that were in the dark, before the sun rose, where I ran early in order to shower before boarding long distance buses that departed at sunrise. The barking dogs were more frightening when they were barking in the dark, and the few early commuters that passed by, carrying their breakfasts, were more suspicious.
This habit of morning runs helped me become spatially oriented in each new town I slept in, as I had to learn its roads and then cover them in miles. It also opened up additional windows into locals’ lives in the places I visited. I saw what people did in the morning — the errands they completed, how the children went to school, what was purchased at the markets, the regularity with which people swept their stoops. In order to run “far”, I jogged to what I would have assumed were mundane places, and encountered sights I otherwise wouldn’t have known, like the temples that were still in use.
When I did run in areas that only had majorly touristed roads, running in the morning let me be alone. Alone on the paths while other visitors slept or ate breakfast, but not alone in that I was still accompanied by the people that lived and commuted on these roads.
