I stopped running back in September, shortly before I left for Peace Corps staging. I didn’t do it during pre-service training, in part because I was planning to use the gym at the university (one of my workplaces) after I completed training.
I learned embarrassingly late that the university doesn’t have a gym. Since it’s almost universal that institutions of higher learning in the United States have gyms, it hadn’t even occurred to me that this might not be true in Europe. Oops.
And then came the new year. I didn’t want to start an exercise program with the new year. Back in 1978, my second grade teacher told us all to make new year’s resolutions. Mine was that starting on Jan. 1, 1979, I would never again make another new year’s resolution. At the time, I was just being a smart-ass kid. But at this point, I certainly don’t want to go back on a resolution that I’ve kept for this long. So any self-improvement I do shouldn’t happen with the new year. I waited until late January to join a gym.
The gym I’m using in Tetovo is pretty similar to gyms I’ve used in the USA, with a few important differences. One that makes a lot of sense is that when you check in, you hand your membership card to the front desk attendant, and the attendant gives you a key with a numbered tag on it. This number tells you which locker to use. This way you don’t have to remember which locker you are using that day, since it’s on the key tag, and you don’t have to bring your own padlock to the gym. When you leave, you turn the key back in, and the attendant returns your membership card. This way, if someone accidentally walks out with a key, they know who did it.
Also, the treadmills measure speed exclusively in kilometers per hour and distance exclusively in kilometers, which should be no surprise. (In the USA, it’s usually miles by default, but you can reset it to kilometers if you want. Sometimes it’s only miles with no metric option.) But what is surprising is that the treadmills have instructions printed exclusively in English, with nothing translated into Albanian or any other Balkan language.
I’m running at 8 km/h, which is about 5 mph. (OK, it’s 4.97 mph. Close enough for jazz.) In between running periods, I’m taking walking breaks at 5 km/h (about 3.1 mph). I’m using a treadmill in part because I don’t need to worry about weather or finding a safe place to run, but mostly because it regulates my speed. When I run outdoors, I go considerably faster than 5 mph and wear myself out quickly.
When I started in late January, I tried running for 5 minutes, but I was wearing myself out with that. So after a 5-minute warmup, I ran for 3 minutes, walked 2 minutes, then repeated till I’d gone 5 kilometers. I gradually added to the running time and then cut down the walking breaks to 1 minute. I’ve been running three days a week, making sure not to run on consecutive days.
For the week of Feb. 13-19, I ran six segments of 5 minutes each, broken up by 1-minute walking periods. For the week beginning Feb. 20, I plan to run five segments of 6 minutes each, which is the same total running time of 30 minutes.
At this point, I’m confident that I could enter a 5K race without embarrassing myself. So that’s what I plan to do. I learned of a 5K race that is happening along with the Skopje Marathon on Sunday, Oct. 1. So far, one person from my Peace Corps cohort is planning to join me, along with one person who is hoping to get clearance to be part of the cohort that arrives in September. We might get more to join us.