Don’t let your travel plans interfere with your training goals: tips for exercising on the road at Her Active Life

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Don’t let your travel plans interfere with your training goals: tips for exercising on the road

Posted June 7, 2007 at 04:00 PM by Bridget Sullivan

Section: Her Adventure, Her Fitness, Her Health, Her Motivation, Special Features

The following article was contributed by Christine Scott-Hayward. Christine is a research associate with the Vera Institute of Justice and is a PhD Candidate at NYU’s Institute for Law and Society. She is a member of NYU’s triathlon and running clubs and is currently training for her first half-ironman – Timberman Triathlon.

For those of us who travel for work, it can be a challenge to fit in our workouts. Over the last few months, this has become an issue for me as I travel at least once a month for 2/3 days, and I am training for a Half-Ironman* in August. After some trial and error, travel no longer gets in the way of my training. Here are some of my tips:

1) Make sure your hotel has a gym: Nowadays, most hotels do have gyms and you can generally check out what they have online before you go. While you don’t always have a choice, if you do, I recommend the Hyatt. My last few trips have been to Cincinnati, Ohio and I generally stay at the Hyatt downtown, which has a 24 hour gym, and new Lifetime Fitness machines. While the gym is small, I’ve never had a problem getting a bike or treadmill. On my last trip, I tried the Hilton, which lauds its large gym. While the gym is certainly one of the biggest I’ve seen, the hours are limited and the machines are fairly old. I’ll be going back to the Hyatt for my next trip!

2) Skip the Pool: I generally avoid hotel pools for two reasons. First, they are usually quite short, 15 meters long at most, which means you seem to be turning all the time. Second, they are often full of recreational swimmers and children and it can be hard to get a smooth rhythm going.

3) Run Outside: It is quite easy to find local running routes and it can be a great way to check out a new city. There are a few ways to find routes:
• Check out USATF.org. This is a USA Track and Field database that uses Google technology. Runners around the country can enter their favorite
running routes. To find a route, just enter the city in which you want to run, the distance you want to run and search away.
• Look at the websites of local running stores (just google running store and the name of the city) – they often post popular local routes.
• If you subscribe to Runner’s World, tear out and keep those one page stories they do on a different city each month. They usually map out three routes of varying
length and difficulty.

If you do run outside, I’d recommend bringing a map. This paid off yesterday, when I was running back to my hotel from a park north of downtown, when the street I was on turned into a highway. I had printed out a basic map, and a quick look showed me an alternate route home (although it did mean running back up the really steep hill I had just run down!)

*Editor’s Note: For those of you that don’t know, a Half-Ironman = 1.2mile Swim | 56mile Bike | 13.1mile Run.

Photo: ©istockphoto.com/Dr. Heinz Linke