Saturday, September 12, 2009

Favourite Buenos Aires Activity #2: Exercise

As I've mentioned, cheap food isn't always healthy, and anyway, who can resist the siren call of dulce de leche? To mitigate the more undesirable effects of too much steak and wine (and my inability to refuse the dessert menu in a restaurant), we signed up at a gym and hired a personal trainer within a few weeks of landing in Buenos Aires. While I've paid as much as $80 for a personal training session in NYC (Richie!), here we paid just over $10 for a session that included a 10-minute massage (!).

Buenos Aires has a surprisingly large community of runners, and even though I decided back in June to forego marathon training this year, I ran a handful of times in Palermo parks, which are beautiful and safe. I also ran a few races in these parks, and even PR'd in the last one I ran, in June.

Walking around the city is also great exercise; you just have to be vigilant about watching for dog poop. Consider it additional training, like an obstacle course! You could also walk your own dog (or 12).

And of course, there's dancing. Tango is the most obvious choice, but in the four months we lived here, we never made it to a class, let along a milonga. We did, however, try out Zouk-Lambada, a French-Brazilian dirty dancing, and tomorrow night will be testing our mad Samba skillz at a bar in San Telmo.

Links:

Gym: Always Club in Palermo

Running Clubs:
Club de Corredores has a group that meets weekly. The club also organizes regular races in Palermo Parks.
BsAs Runners also organizes races around the city.

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