Thoughts on Running in Romania

For non-runners, this may be a pretty boring post. But, since a lot of my time here in Bucharest is spent training for the marathon, I figured it would be appropriate to comment on some of the challenges of running here.

- Bucharest is a smelly, smelly place. On a daily basis, it's annoying, but ignorable. When running, however, it's much less easy to ignore. Now, I'm a person with a pretty strong gag reflex; smells don't usually bother me. But these smells have caused me to almost puke, which is not a good feeling while trying to run long distances. Usually, I think the smells are either rotting animal corpses, rotting trash, or human excrement. Really unpleasant.

- The animals are no less annoying when they're still alive. Many runners in Bucharest carry sticks or pepper spray to keep the stray dogs away. I haven't had to resort to that yet, but most strays really don't like people running near them and get pretty antsy.

- Romanians stare at anything they perceive as different (even my culture guide notes this). Unfortunately for me, they perceive a female American runner is definitely different to them. During any given run, there are dozens of people staring at me, yelling at me, saying things to me in Romanian, honking at me, etc. At first, I though it was pretty funny. After a few hundred instances of this, it just really pisses me off now. The runner in me is annoyed because it's very distracting, the feminist in me is pissed because I should be able to run without being harassed.

- Bucharest is not easily traversable. There are big holes in the roads/sidewalks, places where no sidewalks exist, random mounds of dirt/trash in odd places, and cars parked on the sidewalks. It gets tiring on long runs.

- My final annoyance is the lack of supplied. I need new shoes, new socks, some Powerbars, new Fuelbelt bottles (Delilah chewed mine), etc. But since no Romanians run, there aren't any running stores.

Despite all these things, there have been some nice moments. There are some truly beautiful areas of Bucharest that I've gotten to see, that I would never see if I didn't run. You don't truly know a city, til you've run through it.