After a lot of travel injuries and an extended running hiatus, recently I’ve gotten back on my feet and have finished 1/2 marathons in Cuba, Cambodia and Bangkok. “How (and why) do you run races in the far corners of the earth?”, is the question I’m most often asked when it comes to my nomadic racing habit. (Closely followed by, ‘What countries have you run races in?’) I’ve been a runner as long as I can remember. Never a fast runner, but always a committed runner. Running keeps me sane and goals keep me running while I’m on the road, so I often look for race opportunities that overlap with my wanderings. Not to mention there isn’t a much better way to see a city then by covering 13.1 miles of it on foot. You’ve already heard the story of my first marathon in Amsterdam, but long before that, it was the amazing country of Thailand where I first caught the bug of lacing up my running shoes in cross-cultural competitions. Catching the nomadic running fever In April of 1997 I moved to Thailand. Living in a strange Bangkok neighborhood and in an incredibly hot country for the first time ever, I struggled to motivate myself to exercise. When I saw an advertisement for a 1/2 marathon in the beach town of Pattaya I knew it was the perfect challenge to get me out the door. I’d never run that far before, so if I wanted to live through it, I’d have to put in the miles. Training while living in the city center of Bangkok was just the start of the adventure. As a young and penniless teacher i I didn’t have the big bucks to join a gym, so it was just me and the road. Potholes, pollution, three legged rabid dogs and friendly buses were a free bonus. I trained for many weeks, and then on race weekend I traveled to Pattaya. As I made my way to the starting line pre-dawn on race morning there were a few things that I very quickly recognized were different from any race I’d ever run before: It was pitch dark There were almost no other women runners There were very few foreigners at all When the gun shot fired, I crossed the starting line, one foot in front of the other into the dark 13.1 miles ahead. Although I was one of the few foreign runners I certainly didn’t feel alone. In 1997, expats in Thailand were much more of a novelty than they are today, and my first long miles were spent in the companionship of dozens of Thai racers who capitalized on the opportunity to practice their English with the lone farang. I ran in the blackness at a steady pace for the first hour, all the while building confidence that I was going to do just fine in my first half marathon. By Mile 6 the sun was bright, the temperatures were rising, my fellow racers had exhausted their English vocabulary, and that confidence was waning.

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Content preview: After a lot of travel injuries and an extended running hiatus, recently I’ve gotten back on my feet and have finished 1/2 marathons in Cuba, Cambodia and Bangkok. “How (and why) do you run races in the far corners of the earth?”, is the question I’m most often asked when it comes to my nomadic racing habit. (Closely followed by, ‘What countries have you run races in?’) I’ve been a runner as long as I can remember. Never a fast runner, but always a committed runner. Running keeps me sane and goals keep me running while I’m on the road, so I often look for race opportunities that overlap with my wanderings. Not to mention there isn’t a much better way to see a city then by covering 13.1 miles of it on foot. You’ve already heard the story of my first marathon in Amsterdam, but long before that, it was the amazing country of Thailand where I first caught the bug of lacing up my running shoes in cross-cultural competitions. Catching the nomadic running fever In April of 1997 I moved to Thailand. Living in a strange Bangkok neighborhood and in an incredibly hot country for the first time ever, I struggled to motivate myself to exercise. When I saw an advertisement for a 1/2 marathon in the beach town of Pattaya I knew it was the perfect challenge to get me out the door. I’d never run that far before, so if I wanted to live through it, I’d have to put in the miles. Training while living in the city center of Bangkok was just the start of the adventure. As a young and penniless teacher i I didn’t have the big bucks to join a gym, so it was just me and the road. Potholes, pollution, three legged rabid dogs and friendly buses were a free bonus. I trained for many weeks, and then on race weekend I traveled to Pattaya. As I made my way to the starting line pre-dawn on race morning there were a few things that I very quickly recognized were different from any race I’d ever run before: It was pitch dark There were almost no other women runners There were very few foreigners at all When the gun shot fired, I crossed the [...] Content analysis details: (3.3 points, 5.0 required) pts rule name description ---- ---------------------- -------------------------------------------------- 0.0 TVD_RCVD_IP Message was received from an IP address 1.5 CK_HELO_DYNAMIC_SPLIT_IP Relay HELO'd using suspicious hostname (Split IP) 0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message -1.9 BAYES_00 BODY: Bayes spam probability is 0 to 1% [score: 0.0000] 0.7 MIME_HTML_ONLY BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts 1.0 RDNS_DYNAMIC Delivered to internal network by host with dynamic-looking rDNS 2.0 HTML_TITLE_SUBJ_DIFF HTML_TITLE_SUBJ_DIFF After a lot of travel injuries and an extended running hiatus, recently I’ve gotten back on my feet and have finished 1/2 marathons in Cuba, Cambodia and Bangkok. “How (and why) do you run races in the far corners of the earth?”, is the question I’m most often asked when it comes to my nomadic racing habit. (Closely followed by, ‘What countries have you run races in?’) I’ve been a runner as long as I can remember. Never a fast runner, but always a committed runner. Running keeps me sane and goals keep me running while I’m on the road, so I often look for race opportunities that overlap with my wanderings. Not to mention there isn’t a much better way to see a city then by covering 13.1 miles of it on foot. You’ve already heard the story of my first marathon in Amsterdam, but long before that, it was the amazing country of Thailand where I first caught the bug of lacing up my running shoes in cross-cultural competitions. Catching the nomadic running fever In April of 1997 I moved to Thailand. Living in a strange Bangkok neighborhood and in an incredibly hot country for the first time ever, I struggled to motivate myself to exercise. When I saw an advertisement for a 1/2 marathon in the beach town of Pattaya I knew it was the perfect challenge to get me out the door. I’d never run that far before, so if I wanted to live through it, I’d have to put in the miles. Training while living in the city center of Bangkok was just the start of the adventure. As a young and penniless teacher i I didn’t have the big bucks to join a gym, so it was just me and the road. Potholes, pollution, three legged rabid dogs and friendly buses were a free bonus. I trained for many weeks, and then on race weekend I traveled to Pattaya. As I made my way to the starting line pre-dawn on race morning there were a few things that I very quickly recognized were different from any race I’d ever run before: It was pitch dark There were almost no other women runners There were very few foreigners at all When the gun shot fired, I crossed the starting line, one foot in front of the other into the dark 13.1 miles ahead. Although I was one of the few foreign runners I certainly didn’t feel alone. In 1997, expats in Thailand were much more of a novelty than they are today, and my first long miles were spent in the companionship of dozens of Thai racers who capitalized on the opportunity to practice their English with the lone farang. I ran in the blackness at a steady pace for the first hour, all the while building confidence that I was going to do just fine in my first half marathon. By Mile 6 the sun was bright, the temperatures were rising, my fellow racers had exhausted their English vocabulary, and that confidence was waning. Я научился зарабатывать и теперь у меня родители одалживают деньги Более подробно