Jogging at Hồ Hoàn Kiếm

Our seminar leader, Desaix Anderson, was kind enough to lead an expedition last week to two gyms in the area: a less expensive community gym (large, crowded, not air-conditioned) and a more elite gym at one of the foreign hotels (small but air-conditioned). The extreme budget version is the early morning run around Hoan Kiem Lake, the scenic wonder at the heart of our district.

I'm a gym fan -- by which I mean, an air-conditioned fitness club, one in which I can watch Law & Order reruns on TNT while pounding up and down on an elliptical trainer, knowing that my warm-up is over by the time Jerry Orbach makes his quip about the week's murder victim (e.g., "someone punched his ticket, all right") and my cool-down begins at the moment of the big reveal in the assistant D.A.'s office. Or where I can stand in front of a mirror while lifting dumbbells, obsessively watching to see if my biceps are growing.

But I'm holding off on starting my one-month membership at the hotel gym for another week, and decided today to take the plunge for an early (5:45 a.m.) run at the lake.

Like me, Hanoi keeps the hours of Murder, She Wrote fans, closing down in the evening and rising early. My hotel's night manager had not gotten the memo, and when I came down the steps this morning, he was still asleep on a cot in front of the front desk, though he got up without complaint to unlock the front door and gate to allow me to head out. 

But the lake itself was packed with tai chi crowds, some light aerobics crews, and phalanx after phalanx of morning walkers on the footpaths. The joggers stayed mostly on the roads, though my fear of the city's motorbikes -- not yet out in force, but not absent either -- made me stay on the trails. I decided that although I was clearly breaking some unspoken norms, I decided to treat the walkers the way that motorbikes treat me -- as obstacles to be avoided, with me silently plotting their paths and dodging and weaving around them.

The guidebooks will tell you that the circumference of the lake is roughly a mile, which I myself confirmed with my internal odometer. I know my body well. It's a machine, though not so much in the well-oiled Ferrari sense and even less in the terrifying Terminator sense, but perhaps more in the Rube-Goldberg-contraption sense, with various springs and levers that manage, through excessive effort, to produce minimal functions, all the while entertaining spectators with its apparent proximity to total breakdown. 

And so I could count off the distance (1 lap = 1 mile) through my body's reactions. 

.001 laps: begin to sweat noticeably

.005 laps: increased sweating accompanied by labored breathing

.1 laps: beginning to contemplate my own mortality

.15 laps: concerns about my mortality accompanied by personal regrets about my life up to this point

.2 laps: personal regrets shift toward free-floating anxiety about my failures as a son, brother, friend, teacher, and student, and all the pain I have ever caused to others during my life, and wondering whether karma dictates that I will suffer a coronary on the trail, with my soggy corpse being treated primarily as an obstacle by Hanoi residents out for their morning walks

.5 laps: through sheer force of will, manage to focus my anxieties on my failure to do my Vietnamese homework for this afternoon: asking the names and occupations of three strangers and getting their answers only in Vietnamese

.55 laps: recognition that I can't accomplish this during my run, given that I can barely say my own name in English, given my lungs' strenuous efforts simply to keep the levers and springs working

.7 laps: fatalistic acceptance that we all have to go sometime, and this beautiful lake in the early morning is as good a place and time as any

.75 laps: more focused attention on the article I need to revise by the end of next month

By the second lap, the sheer beauty of the lake, combined with the surprisingly reassuring combination of New Age Music and scratchy movement commands for morning calisthenics, had cleared my head somewhat. I wonder about the other walkers. They mostly look middle-class to me, and I wonder how communities are developed in these morning exercise groups. And what one sacrifices and gains by going for the air-conditioned fitness clubs in different parts of the city. Is there status associated with being in a fitness club instead of working out amidst the crowds lining the lake? I don't expect to have answers by the time I leave Hanoi, but I'm glad that even a morning run -- at an hour far I'd even be up in the United States -- can provoke questions beyond simply whether I can complete the run.