Staying Active While Abroad

I am now two months into my ten-month exchange here in Germany, and I am still figuring out ways to keep my body moving and maintain the fitness I built as a varsity runner back in the US. While practices for varsity sports in the US are typically affiliated with the high school you attend and take place every day after school for over an hour, sports in Germany are entirely different. Here, schools do not have sports teams; instead, students join clubs that they attend in the evening, independent of their school. I joined a track team in the area that meets twice a week for an hour and a half. It’s a small group spanning ages from grade school to adulthood, with various groups based on distance and pace—very different from the 60-person high school track team at the large public high school I run for in North Carolina.

With practice only twice a week, I have had to be creative in order to stay fit, especially as the weather starts to become colder and wetter, and motivation is harder to find. The fact that my small town of Bad Oeynhausen is surrounded by nature trails through the woods and wide-open paths along winding country roads makes it the perfect place for long runs and good playlists. Even on the rainier days (and there are a lot of them in North Rhine-Westphalia winters, I've been told), getting outside and into the woods helps me to destress after a long school day of trying to comprehend chemistry and biology in German. Exercise, combined with a lovely host family, sweet friends, and good food have kept homesickness at bay and filled each day with something to look forward to. 

One thing that I love about Germany is how, in order to go anywhere, most people prefer to bike. Rather than a huge parking lot on the school campus, as would be typical at any high school in the US, there is a large bike cage where over four hundred students lock their bikes every day. Compared to the US, this lifestyle means that I don't have to put as much thought into how I am going to stay active because walking and biking are an integral part of each day. It also means that if it is pouring rain and almost at below freezing temperatures in the morning, you question some of the choices that led to you biking to school in Germany. But on most mornings, it is a great way of waking yourself up before first period starts. As it gets colder, I will probably get a gym membership for days when it is too cold for runs through the woods, and, naturally, I will have to bike to the gym as well.