Staying In Shape On the Road
If you’re someone who likes to stay active and be at least a little fit, traveling can throw a big kink into your plans. For most people, traveling equals vacation so it’s not that big of a deal to take a week or two off while you’re relaxing in a beautiful new locale—skipping workouts might even be part of the appeal of the trip! But when you travel full-time, especially if you’re moving to a new place every month or two, it’s challenging to build and maintain a fitness routine.
Running
Running is definitely one of the easiest ways to exercise on the road. You can do it almost anywhere and it doesn’t require much specialized equipment. It’s also a great way to get to know the place you’re living in and gives you a way to see parts of the city you wouldn’t otherwise have a reason to explore. It’s also a way to get more insight into how the locals live. Often, you end up running in parks or other outdoor public spaces where the locals are spending outdoor time. Indeed, if you’re in a city those are probably the only outdoor areas most of the residents can enjoy so they can be quite lively.
In Ho Chi Minh City, our runs along the canal between our apartment and the city zoo always seemed to be an adventure. Between the groups of women doing classic 80’s jazzercise, old men doing odd stretches and calisthenics, kids playing in the parks, and even stumbling across dragon boat races, there always seemed to be interesting sights. One of the highlights of running there, too, was that the zoo was spacious and uncrowded—and only cost about a dollar to enter—so we sometimes did our run throughout the zoo!
In Budapest, we had a huge park less than a kilometer from our apartment with many walking paths intertwined throughout. We could put together runs of just about any distance by weaving all around the park. This gave us plenty of opportunities to capture pictures of the street art by Mr. F—always an elephant head but each piece different from the others. We have no idea who he is or if he’s anyone noteworthy (or maybe just a local gangster claiming territory) but the frequency of his tags became a theme of our visit there.
Vienna offered a beautiful park on an island in the Danube river. Long and narrow, it was lined on both sides with paved trails used by walkers, runners, bikers, and rollerbladers. Although I wasn’t running at the time due to my plantar fasciitis, Carrie took great advantage of the park to train for the Las Vegas Half Marathon while I would often walk it while she ran.
We ran into our first real challenge with running while in Cape Town. Although it’s a beautiful city with a couple of mountains plopped right in its center, there aren’t that many parks around the city. We were lucky to have a modestly sized park with a wide, shady pedestrian lane that ran alongside a city garden, but we didn’t take advantage of it much for running. I was still dealing with plantar fasciitis. Carrie wanted to keep up with her running, but the number of homeless and the amount of crime was a significant enough concern to keep her from wanting to run alone. Although the park was often patrolled by police and we were rarely approached by any of the homeless there, she just didn’t feel comfortable by herself. Several times I went with her and walked while she ran up and down the lane; it just wasn’t the same and certainly wasn’t as enjoyable.
Running in Capetown.
Gyms
Carrie and I try to balance our fitness routine between weight training and cardio. We’re not bodybuilders (obviously!) but we also know that every year after age thirty, an inactive person loses about three percent of their lean muscle. Doing resistance workouts can be the most challenging part of travel. So far, everywhere we’ve traveled (pre-Covid) we’ve been able to find a gym that we can use.
Although few gyms advertise it, virtually all have either a punch card or short-term membership option. Of course, they prefer for people to get a membership (and then never actually go) so they don’t like to talk about options that don’t involve an initiation fee or automatically recurring payment. However, when you tell them that you’re a visitor who’s only in town for a month or so, they realize you’re not going to join and are generally happy to offer you a shorter-term option.
Our gym in Ho Chi Minh City.
I think the gym we used in Vietnam might have been the most interesting place we’ve ever worked out. Despite high humidity and daily temperatures in the eighties and nineties, it had large garage doors that opened it up to the outside and no air conditioning. There were plenty of fans, though! I don’t think a single person there ever spoke any English. We must have made liberal use of Google Translate to get a one-month pass set up! The people there were always very friendly and it wasn’t uncommon for the trainers to come over and correct our form or encourage us. It was cramped though and if there were more than two or three other people working out in there it could become a challenge!
Our awesome gym in Budapest.
What I remember best about working out in Budapest was how serious everyone seemed to be about fitness. It wasn’t so much that the other patrons were gigantic, over-muscled powerlifters, but that virtually everyone there looked like they were fitness models. I don’t know if that was a reflection of the gym we joined—we had intentionally skipped the closest gym, despite it being cheaper, and chose one a that was less busy a few blocks further away—or if it was a reflection of Hungarian fitness dedication. However, judging by the nude sunbathers in the nearby park, you wouldn’t guess that physical fitness is a cultural norm there!
Walking
Simultaneously underrated and overrated, I do believe that walking is an excellent form of exercise. We walk a lot. If something is walking distance—generally up to a mile away, sometimes two—we will pretty much always walk. We try to take daily morning walks and, yes, we track steps and shoot for at least 10,000 per day. I think too few people recognize the value of walking and avoid it any cost. I even find it frustrating that so many people stand on escalators!
Although we didn’t use the confusing and less-than-reliable Vietnamese public transportation, Uber was available and was amazingly cheap—never more than two dollars except when we went to/from the airport. But we rarely used it and preferred to walk everywhere. Walking took us through neighborhoods that most foreigners never see or simply buzz by in a car. Often, the walking around a city is more enjoyable than whatever sight we were out and about to see in the first place. We’ve stumbled across countless interesting things that never would have been on our radar otherwise.
Vienna has a garden of grapes right in the heart of the city. We wandered into a wine festival in Budapest. In Vietnam we observed a funeral procession with a large, elaborate wooden wagon acting as the hearse. Nevermind the countless out-of-the-way statues, monuments, and historical markers we’ve seen.
Covid
Of course, Covid put a damper on a lot of the ways we normally try to stay fit. Gyms have been closed and in Barcelona we weren’t even allowed to go for walks, nevermind running. To stay busy there, we had to get creative. First, we started running up and down the six flights of stairs in our apartment building. To augment this, we also bought a number of different bottles of water in a variety of sizes: half a liter, liter, two liters, three liters, and even five liters. Knowing that a liter of water weights a kilogram, it was easy to try to adapt some of the gym exercises into home versions. We used reusable grocery bags to combine bottles of different sizes to make the desired weight and would do all kinds of lifts. Of course, we also augmented with bodyweight exercises.
Eventually, we turned to YouTube to find interesting ways to keep moving. In particular, we started doing high intensity interval training workouts (HIIT) put together by a couple who post under the profile HasFit. We’ve considered some of the other paid options for home workouts, but still find that most of the workouts offered on HasFit still have us sweaty and exhausted by the end.
To spice things up a bit, I also did some research on Tabata methods for cardio and have put together some workouts myself in that style. In addition, I found some lightweight jump ropes to give us some more variety and hopefully strengthen my plantar fascia!
Dealing with jugs of water for strength training started getting really old, so when we arrived in Denver I started looking for exercise bands. They’d been nearly impossible to find in the first few months after the pandemic started but by June I was able to find some. Although we have to be very careful about how much stuff we’re lugging around, I initially wasn’t worried because of our plans to be mostly driving around the US for the summer. And I’ll admit that at first, I wasn’t too thrilled with them. After using “real” weights for so long it was difficult to adjust. The weight listed on each band doesn’t correlate much to the real world, especially since the resistance increases the more the band is stretched. It took quite a while of adjustment but after a couple of months I started to feel like I was actually getting a workout with them. In fact, I appreciate them enough that I found a way to make room to travel with them. Nowadays I’m satisfied with them but I’m still very eager to get back into a real weight room.
Here on the Mayan Riviera, a typical week for me consists of doing two or three 45-minute workouts using the bands and two or three workouts of either a HasFit HIIT video, some Tabata, or just jumping rope. Carrie is gradually working her way back into running after taking some time away from it and I’m still hopeful that I’ll be able to resume running in the not-too-distant future. She also started doing yoga to maintain sanity during our Barcelona lockdown and has kept the habit of a daily yoga practice. We try to take a morning walk of about two miles most days and often will do another one in the evening before dinner, especially if it was an otherwise lazy day! This was particularly enjoyable in Costa Rica where we saw all kinds of interesting wildlife on these walks and had spectacular ocean views, to boot. Of course, when we’re someplace where hiking is an option, we take advantage of it. Our next Airbnb also has a private pool with a lap lane, so maybe we’ll start swimming, too!