Running in Bagan, Myanmar

Kiyomi Ran
Sep 14, 2017
2 min read

I am in Myanmar for this entire week, or week 9 of my marathon training.

I have my half marathon on the 24th, so thankfully, my schedule includes the beginning of the tapering this week while I am in Myanmar. I was worried about not being able to run as much, but it turns out the running here has been great - even the weather hasn't been that bad.

On Monday, we arrived in Yangon after a two hour delay from Tokyo. Therefore, we landed pretty late.

Early next morning, we headed straight to Bagan, a small city famous for its Buddhist temples (there are hundreds of them) kind of like the Angkor Wat of Myanmar. The temples were breathtaking, though the Buddha statues in each one of them were quite creepy, so I refrained from taking pictures of them. You know what makes them creepy though? It's that they paint actual eyes on the statues. When you go to some other Buddhist countries, the Buddha usually has his eyes closed or they don't paint the eyes like the way you never see eyes on Greek/Roman statues. But apart from that, the temples were gorgeous as you can see:

As for the running, I ran twice in Bagan, both around the time of the sunrise because otherwise it would get too hot. Did you know that the people here wake up early, rest in the afternoon, and work again at night to avoid the heat? I can totally see why. Bagan was actually not too hot in the morning, around the same as Tokyo on a hot day, so I definitely had no issues with acclimatization. The two runs were pretty much the same route since the city is small and there was one road from my hotel. If you turn left from the hotel, there's a bunch of motorcycles and dusty roads, but if you turn right, you can see many temples and get a bit of quiet. So of course, I turned right both times.

From Myanmar Treasure Resort Bagan, the first run was actually intervals and you can check the route here:

And here are some photos. The sky was so clear in the morning.

The second one was hotter the next day and it was a recovery run, so my pace was much slower. You can check out the run on Strava or here:

And more photos. Since I got up earlier than the day before, the sky was almost pink.

And of course, a pool dip afterwards!

Alright, time for some food pics. We went to Sunset Restaurant, Wether Spoons, Queens Restaurant, and La Terrazza.

Sunset was touristy, Wether Spoons was good and cheap and international with a great Mango Sticky Rice, Queens was Burmese, and La Terrazza is an Italian-run restaurant with great pizzas and tiramisu!