Running Korea and Seoul mates

The long haul flight, eight hour time difference and the unfamiliar culture and cuisine weren't the best ingredients for a successful week of training, but – as with every foreign trip I take for work – I was determined to lace up my trainers and see something of my new surroundings, even if it was just the nearest treadmill.

Sadly my first impressions were inauspicious. The gym which had been advertised on the hotel website failed to materialise, the temperature was nudging thirty and really sticky, and I had such bad jetlag I felt like my legs were tied together and anchored by a lead weight.

Luckily, a chance encounter with a colleague improved the situation. She told me there was a 38 kilometre track skirting the edge of the river Han that flows through Seoul.

My first run through the South Korean capital was a tiring, sweaty and slow affair. Picking my way along the riverbank, I shuffled past the high-rise buildings home to the city’s financial centre, watching families, teenagers and elderly couples enjoying the late afternoon sunshine.

My legs eased off as the river bank began to get more and more crowded with a surge of lycra-clad businessmen and women on sparkling bikes, and younger couples weaving haphazardly along the path, performing an unspoken dance that meant that somehow they didn’t hit anyone else.

Running without my Garmin, which I’d forgotten to pack was both liberating and irritating, but I managed to run for an hour and, although it didn’t entirely shift the jetlag, it did make me feel a little more human.

I ran part of that route again the following day as a respite from a long day of meetings and I wasn’t alone. Runners galore were pounding the pavement along the river, enjoying the pastel pink hue that fell on the Seoul skyline as the working day ended.

Two days later, nursing seemingly intractable jetlag and a stomach that had been protesting against something I’d eaten, I set out in the opposite direction, discovering to my delight that there were kilometre markers along this section of the river, which partly followed the same route as the Seoul marathon.

It was the end of the work day again, and as I ran, I watched people of all ages using the exercise equipment that dots the shores of the Han. I marvelled at the way some people wore masks as they used the machines under busy flyovers, from which cars churned out fumes as they sat bumper to bumper consumed by Seoul’s rush hour.

Technologically-advanced Seoul, home to such big name companies as Samsung, was once one of the most polluted cities in the region but now has giant screens up in many of the city centre streets advising the population of its pollution levels and telling citizens if it’s safe to exercise outside.

The kilometres slipped away, as I ran hypnotised by the colour and chaos that was the Han river bank and seventy minutes – and almost nine miles - after leaving the hotel, I arrived back to the amusement of my colleagues, who were probably shocked by the transformation of me from relatively sophisticated businesswoman to red-faced runner, dripping from the effort of running for that long in such high humidity.

I was coming to the end of my visit to Seoul. The business meetings and conference were over. I had a day to enjoy the sights of the city and the wider country. Never a fan of tours, I was nonetheless eager to visit the DMZ, the demilitarised zone between South and North Korea. The visit was peculiar, the site was swarming with tour buses and with an atmosphere more like a theme park than the last frontier of the Cold War, it left me feeling the need to run away - or at least to slip on trainers.

And, so I took to the river bank one more time, mulling over the barbed wire and watch towers I’d seen further upstream that the tour guide said had been put in place by the South Koreans in case of North Korean spies. The difference between that image and those I’d seen during my runs in Seoul was immense.

Heading back to the hotel on my last run, I realised that running had once again allowed me to appreciate so much more of a country. It might not quite have matched my optimum training for the week, but it hadn’t too badly affected my running Korea, and I realised that when it came to shared enjoyment in the sport, this was one place where I certainly had a lot of Seoul mates!

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