It’s fair to say I’ve embarrassed myself more than a few times in Colombia. These toe-curlers range from single-handedly toppling a heavy-laden bar table, soaking both friends and strangers alike with a tragically delicious cocktail of Colombian beers, from stepping on an unfortunate salsa partner’s toes so many times that she politely made her excuses and slipped away, leaving me to lick my wounds.
However, the site of one of my most embarrassing Colombian misjudgments was not a back-alley bar or a sweat-soaked salsa dance floor. It was rather a glitzy gymnasium, which provided the backdrop to this particular humiliation, early on in my Colombian stay.
My stay in Colombia began comfortably, to say the least. The Bogota? hotel that the volunteer program had placed us in during our lengthy induction was decidedly and dedicatedly up-market.
Although its isolated location did sometimes inspire a touch of cabin fever, we were fortunate enough to have access to a wide variety of activities to pass the long hours. In particular, the hotel gym, admirably well-equipped and supplied with its own sauna, was a testament to the power of selective spending, and made the various U.K. gyms I’d got used to pale in comparison.
Of course, I decided to seize the opportunity while I could. Within a few days of checking in, I strolled (yes, strolled) through the sliding doors. I had been running regularly around my home village in leafy, sleepy Dorset for the past few months, and this, of course, completely qualified me to work out in such palatial surroundings.
I nodded knowingly to the other patrons, as if to acknowledge our shared brotherhood in this veritable temple of tonification, ascended the treadmill as was my God-given right, and set up my usual run. Clearly, these people were about to be ‘shown’.
I must say, the initial 5-minute warm-up was nothing short of heavenly. My delusions of athleticism went blissfully unchallenged as the gym’s ample air conditioning and fragrant atmosphere provided the pleasant sensation of sauntering unencumbered along a mountain trail, not a care in the world.
It was around the six-and-a-half-minute mark, where I began to engage in what might charitably be called a gentle jog, that things began to go wrong. The blissful mountain path took a sharp uphill turn into avowedly rocky territory, and before long, where in the UK I would have been chuntering happily along, I found myself dragging my feet and gasping like an asthmatic fish out of water.
These were gasps of surprise as much as fatigue – what had happened to me? Eventually, as the treadmill’s speed passed into the upper bracket, the protest from my lungs, lungs raised on rich English country air, overpowered me.
After a couple of minutes spent leaning half-asleep on the treadmill’s bars, my short, catastrophic reign as King of the Gym was over. I eventually left a full 10 minutes before I’d planned, with my tail between my legs and the knowing smiles of the gym’s Colombian patrons marking my steps.
Of course, the source of my woes is now obvious, nicotine-stained youth aside. My pitiful performance didn’t stem, as I had feared, from a particularly abysmal lack of fitness. Rather, raw altitude had caught me unawares and taken me to the proverbial cleaners.
Bogotá is the fourth-highest capital city amongst those of the United Nations’ 193 member states, clocking in at 2,625 metres above sea level, and is the third highest in the Americas, behind Quito at 2,685 metres, and La Paz at a whopping 3,640 metres.
For perspective, London sits comfortably at 14 metres, and the sleepy Dorset village and Oxford University, the places where I’d first started properly exercising, lie lower still.
In spite of this, a recent cycling tour of Bogota?, while trying, had failed to alert me to one simple fact. My pampered lungs had grown used to more oxygen-rich air in my homeland, and, in light of my ordeal in that gleaming gym, it was a grim realization that I would either have to tough out my new circumstances or forgo one of my hobbies.
After all, my eventual destination of Manizales is described as having an ‘abrupt topography’ (to say the least) and rests in the figurative and literal shadow of the Nevado Del Rui?z, one of Colombia’s tallest mountains at 5,321 metres. Time to go hard or go home, to employ a gym-talk cliche?.
And so, my acclimatisation to oxygen-thin Colombian air began. While my first few sallies after my arrival in Manizales were no less excruciating, and the outdoor runs frequently interrupted by pesky highland rains, I persevered, and before long was adeptly zipping around the city’s slopes and dips.
The culmination of this success came when I chose to run a 10k in the Medelli?n Marato?n de Flores, and while I didn’t finish among the top few, I took pride in my thoroughly adequate time. It was then that I realised the gift Colombia had given me.
Out of the pain of that initial workout, I realised that the opportunity to exercise at altitude would serve me well when I returned to my homeland (and after all this, I fully expect to be able to fly when I return to Dorset) and it had been my choice to make the most of this opportunity.
My failure had been a chance in disguise. A painful, embarrassing chance.
Indeed, as I near the end of my time in this country, I realise that many of the experiences I’ve had here, while occasionally trying and frequently irksome, have been opportunities much the same.
We were of course amply warned of the ‘shock’ of moving to a new culture during our extensive, hotel-ridden induction all that time ago, and, as you may have seen in my previous writings, I’ve certainly experienced my share of that.
I’ve been an asthmatic fish out of water in situations not only athletic, but religious, professional and romantic. However, each ‘shock’ in turn provides us with a choice, and the enduring maxim I will take from my time in Colombia is this; adversity truly is what you make of it.
