My plan for coming to Thailand was simple: do my fieldwork and train for more triathlons. I figured with free time after the forest, endless good weather (meaning no Canadian snow), and hills as far as the eye could see, Khao Yai would be the best place for me to learn how to become a better athlete. There’s no place to swim here, but I could run and bike for hours on end. So when I arrived in January 2010, I put on my sneakers and I started to run.
I’m not going to lie, running here sucks. It’s hard. It’s really, really hard. And after 1.5 years, it’s still not getting any easier. “Khao Yai” translates directly from Thai to English into “Big Mountain” and that’s exactly, quite literally, what this place is: a damn, big mountain. Even the “flat land” has hills; they just aren’t as steep as the “real hills”. :) But I made the commitment to myself to run, so I continue to put on my shoes and go.
Not long after I started running was the Best Day Ever when I made my first Thai friend: Jambee.
I couldn’t speak Thai and she couldn’t speak English, but she showed me her running shoes, put them on when I put mine on, and we ran together around the park. I told her I couldn’t speak Thai very well but I wanted Thai friends and so I would learn to speak Thai if people talked to me. She told me she wanted to run before I arrived, but had no friends to run with her and never went. I then told her I would “husband” run with her because I mixed up the Thai words for “always” with “husband.” She shook her head and then told me she would run with me whenever I went.
Before Jambee and I started running in the park no other females exercised around here. In fact, though the kids played soccer together in the parking lot some nights and some of the park rangers got together in the dry season months to play “da-gaw” (think of a cross between volleyball and soccer) pretty much no one else exercised around here, with the exception of three men: Boon Ying, Boon Tah and Chaleam, all three veteran endurance runners who go out every morning for a 10+km run starting at 5:30am.
When Jambee first started running with me she got a lot of “flack” from the other Thais, shouting things like: “Where are you going with the foreigner?! What are you doing with the foreigner?! WHY ARE YOU IN THE CAR WITH THE FOREIGNER?!” ha ha. But she always responded to their exasperated questions by simply saying: “I want to run.”
It took about two weeks of us running together before the shifty eyes of the Thai people directed towards me turned into shy, happy glances and smiles. People would gleefully call out to Jambee on their motorbikes as they drove by and honk their car horns to say hi. It took about 2 months before people started talking to me about running, and that soon became, and continues to be, the hot topic of conversation for any Thai person wanting to talk to me.
I have always been appreciative that everyone noticed and seems to be pleased by my running efforts, though sometimes it felt odd. When Chaleam, my field assistant – not a runner, just another guy named Chaleam – would introduce me to people he would include “She runs everyday” in the standard description: "She’s a researcher. She studies gibbons. She comes from Canada. She can speak Thai now. She runs everyday." Tourists would take “drive by” pictures of me running along the road as they passed in their cars and eventually that turned into people actually stopping me to talk and asking to have their picture taken with me (because seeing foreigners is rare and exciting to them, a picture of me running is NOT glamorous by any means).
When people saw me out and about around the park, and after my Thai improved considerably from practice with Jambee, questions about when I would run, how far I would run, how much I run, why I run and descriptions of where people saw me running were all anyone would ever speak with me about. And after a while I started to wonder why everyone seemed to be so obsessed with my running, until one day Rebecca pointed out: maybe they just want to talk to you and that’s all they can think of to talk about with you; since they see you running it’s common ground. (Good call, Rebecca.) That reality check quickly reminded me to refocus on their smiles and enthusiasm during our conversations and to not be too concerned about the content. :)
After about 5 months of running daily, much to my surprise, it appeared that other people around the park were starting to get the spark to run too. Though Jambee and I were the only two who would consistently run, others were joining us when they could. Two girls that live/work near my house, Ting and Boom, started running with us when they had time in the evenings, and one morning when I was driving into the forest I passed by Poom, the girl who works at the main Visitor Centre convenience store, running along the road near her house. So Jambee and I made plans to occasionally run in the morning with Poom. On the first day with Poom we ran 5km; the usual for Jambee and I, but 3 extra kms for Poom who normally only ran 2km near her house. When I asked if she was Ok and could she handle it? She replied by saying “It doesn’t matter; I have friends to run with so it’s very fun.”
Over the following weeks, three other women (whose names, I unfortunately do not know) started walking our route in the evenings (they wanted to exercise but couldn’t keep up with us running). And another woman began alternating between running with her son occasionally and walking with the other ladies.
When Navigator showed up in November 2010 to do a special feature on the park and after we spent some time together looking for animals, one day after they had stopped filming here they called from Bangkok and to say they wanted to come back to film a lead into the segment on gibbons with me.
"We want to show Thai people that they can come to Khao Yai to exercise here like you do.” They said, “Bring all your friends that run with you and we will meet you for your evening run.”
And so, since Tik (the Navigator) is the “Thai Superstar” who makes all the females swoon in this country, I invited every female in the park I knew – whether they usually ran with me or not, to come running that night. :) The women had already been on my case for weeks about how I was spending time with him and how foolish I was to be photographing the animals in the park instead of him, and how thoughtless it was of me for not inviting him to come eat at the restaurant so they could meet him. So this was the perfect opportunity.
“Don’t worry about running.” I said, “it won’t be much but this is your chance to meet him, so come with me!”
Everyone was very excited, but Thai people are also extremely shy – in the end, only Jambee came with me.
In January 2011, Jambee came in second place in the Khao Yai 3k fun run to celebrate the birthday of the first park chief. It was a great day, she outran nearly everyone in a come from behind feat of determination and people still talk about how my pants fell down while I was racing.
In the following months, my running partners started to dwindle, people were getting busier with more tourists visiting the park and my data collection schedule was less uniform, making my running times more sporadic. But I kept at it as best I could on my own, and people still stopped to talk to me about running all the time. When I would head out with my sneakers on the men around the office would ask: are you going running now, where are you running and how far are you going? But they would always decline, laughing, when I invited them to come with me.
Then one day I was sitting at the restaurant talking with Bahn when I noticed a man running along the street by the campground office.
“Muak runs here almost every day now when he has time,” explained Bahn. Muak is one of the office staff at the Pha Kluai Mai campgrounds where I live. Turns out his son was running too, with a friend in the afternoons near the office to prepare for soccer. And one evening I met Chan – the office manager at Pha Kluai Mai – running along my running route. He told me he had started running 3km everyday in the evenings. Not long after that encounter, Jambee told me our neighbour Baw had started running along the road near our houses where Muak runs in the evenings. So it turns out, the men weren’t running with me, but they had started to run after all.
Tong-Sai, Baw’s younger brother, is another one of my neighbours. He’s really shy and quiet, but always happy and seems genuinely content with life at all times. He doesn’t say much, but asks about running when I stop to talk to him. Once I invited him to come running with me, but he explained: though he wanted to run, he couldn’t because of a heart condition. Jambee explained further but the Thai was pretty complex, so I’m not sure of the details.
Tonight Jambee and Bahn went to the Monday Market, but I said I didn’t want to go because I wanted to run instead. I ran 10km back and forth on the old golf course (my usual running route in the evenings), during my run I met up with three woman walking, and a tourist who comes to bike here often who, incidentally, I found out tonight, has a brother living in Vancouver that owns a Thai restaurant “Siam Thai” and has traveled to Victoria, Vancouver, Lake Louise, Banff, Toronto and Quebec. And as I was finishing off my final lap of 2km, much to my wonder and surprise, I met TONG-SAI jogging lightly along the path. He ran/walked back and forth just once (2.5km). I nearly exploded I was bursting with so much joy to see him trying and doing what he could!
---
It’s been about 1 year and 9 months since I moved into the majestic Khao Yai National Park to begin my dissertation research on white-handed gibbons and pig-tailed macaques. As most of you know from following my blog, or chatting with me for more than 5 seconds, it’s been a pretty amazing expedition and I’ve been blessed to be surrounded by wonderful people and given tremendous opportunities while living here.
Running at Khao Yai was a simple commitment that I made to myself before I even got here. I don’t run for other people; I just do it for myself. If no one ever went with me, that’d be Ok. I’d keep trying as best I could. I never expected anyone here to run with me or be interested in it. In fact, prior to coming here, I thought Thai people would think it to be very “unfeminine” and see me as a foolish, brutish foreigner trying to be strong like a man instead of soft like a lady. But since I started running here so many months ago, I have been astounded to see how this small commitment I made to myself grew into something much bigger than me around the park. This has led me to the following conclusion:
If you think what you do doesn’t matter, think again. Even if it’s just something you do for yourself, we are all connected, we are primates – this makes us social creatures, this makes us matter to each other, so we pay attention to each other. And even when you think no one is watching, your seemingly small efforts to improve yourself could be the spark that ignites the fire inside one other person that will lead to numerous others.
All it takes is one person, doing what they can, showing it can be done, and putting in the effort… to influence many.
Tweet Follow @primejm Tweet to @primejm
I’m not going to lie, running here sucks. It’s hard. It’s really, really hard. And after 1.5 years, it’s still not getting any easier. “Khao Yai” translates directly from Thai to English into “Big Mountain” and that’s exactly, quite literally, what this place is: a damn, big mountain. Even the “flat land” has hills; they just aren’t as steep as the “real hills”. :) But I made the commitment to myself to run, so I continue to put on my shoes and go.
Not long after I started running was the Best Day Ever when I made my first Thai friend: Jambee.
I couldn’t speak Thai and she couldn’t speak English, but she showed me her running shoes, put them on when I put mine on, and we ran together around the park. I told her I couldn’t speak Thai very well but I wanted Thai friends and so I would learn to speak Thai if people talked to me. She told me she wanted to run before I arrived, but had no friends to run with her and never went. I then told her I would “husband” run with her because I mixed up the Thai words for “always” with “husband.” She shook her head and then told me she would run with me whenever I went.
Before Jambee and I started running in the park no other females exercised around here. In fact, though the kids played soccer together in the parking lot some nights and some of the park rangers got together in the dry season months to play “da-gaw” (think of a cross between volleyball and soccer) pretty much no one else exercised around here, with the exception of three men: Boon Ying, Boon Tah and Chaleam, all three veteran endurance runners who go out every morning for a 10+km run starting at 5:30am.
When Jambee first started running with me she got a lot of “flack” from the other Thais, shouting things like: “Where are you going with the foreigner?! What are you doing with the foreigner?! WHY ARE YOU IN THE CAR WITH THE FOREIGNER?!” ha ha. But she always responded to their exasperated questions by simply saying: “I want to run.”
It took about two weeks of us running together before the shifty eyes of the Thai people directed towards me turned into shy, happy glances and smiles. People would gleefully call out to Jambee on their motorbikes as they drove by and honk their car horns to say hi. It took about 2 months before people started talking to me about running, and that soon became, and continues to be, the hot topic of conversation for any Thai person wanting to talk to me.
I have always been appreciative that everyone noticed and seems to be pleased by my running efforts, though sometimes it felt odd. When Chaleam, my field assistant – not a runner, just another guy named Chaleam – would introduce me to people he would include “She runs everyday” in the standard description: "She’s a researcher. She studies gibbons. She comes from Canada. She can speak Thai now. She runs everyday." Tourists would take “drive by” pictures of me running along the road as they passed in their cars and eventually that turned into people actually stopping me to talk and asking to have their picture taken with me (because seeing foreigners is rare and exciting to them, a picture of me running is NOT glamorous by any means).
When people saw me out and about around the park, and after my Thai improved considerably from practice with Jambee, questions about when I would run, how far I would run, how much I run, why I run and descriptions of where people saw me running were all anyone would ever speak with me about. And after a while I started to wonder why everyone seemed to be so obsessed with my running, until one day Rebecca pointed out: maybe they just want to talk to you and that’s all they can think of to talk about with you; since they see you running it’s common ground. (Good call, Rebecca.) That reality check quickly reminded me to refocus on their smiles and enthusiasm during our conversations and to not be too concerned about the content. :)
After about 5 months of running daily, much to my surprise, it appeared that other people around the park were starting to get the spark to run too. Though Jambee and I were the only two who would consistently run, others were joining us when they could. Two girls that live/work near my house, Ting and Boom, started running with us when they had time in the evenings, and one morning when I was driving into the forest I passed by Poom, the girl who works at the main Visitor Centre convenience store, running along the road near her house. So Jambee and I made plans to occasionally run in the morning with Poom. On the first day with Poom we ran 5km; the usual for Jambee and I, but 3 extra kms for Poom who normally only ran 2km near her house. When I asked if she was Ok and could she handle it? She replied by saying “It doesn’t matter; I have friends to run with so it’s very fun.”
Over the following weeks, three other women (whose names, I unfortunately do not know) started walking our route in the evenings (they wanted to exercise but couldn’t keep up with us running). And another woman began alternating between running with her son occasionally and walking with the other ladies.
When Navigator showed up in November 2010 to do a special feature on the park and after we spent some time together looking for animals, one day after they had stopped filming here they called from Bangkok and to say they wanted to come back to film a lead into the segment on gibbons with me.
"We want to show Thai people that they can come to Khao Yai to exercise here like you do.” They said, “Bring all your friends that run with you and we will meet you for your evening run.”
And so, since Tik (the Navigator) is the “Thai Superstar” who makes all the females swoon in this country, I invited every female in the park I knew – whether they usually ran with me or not, to come running that night. :) The women had already been on my case for weeks about how I was spending time with him and how foolish I was to be photographing the animals in the park instead of him, and how thoughtless it was of me for not inviting him to come eat at the restaurant so they could meet him. So this was the perfect opportunity.
“Don’t worry about running.” I said, “it won’t be much but this is your chance to meet him, so come with me!”
Everyone was very excited, but Thai people are also extremely shy – in the end, only Jambee came with me.
In January 2011, Jambee came in second place in the Khao Yai 3k fun run to celebrate the birthday of the first park chief. It was a great day, she outran nearly everyone in a come from behind feat of determination and people still talk about how my pants fell down while I was racing.
In the following months, my running partners started to dwindle, people were getting busier with more tourists visiting the park and my data collection schedule was less uniform, making my running times more sporadic. But I kept at it as best I could on my own, and people still stopped to talk to me about running all the time. When I would head out with my sneakers on the men around the office would ask: are you going running now, where are you running and how far are you going? But they would always decline, laughing, when I invited them to come with me.
Then one day I was sitting at the restaurant talking with Bahn when I noticed a man running along the street by the campground office.
“Muak runs here almost every day now when he has time,” explained Bahn. Muak is one of the office staff at the Pha Kluai Mai campgrounds where I live. Turns out his son was running too, with a friend in the afternoons near the office to prepare for soccer. And one evening I met Chan – the office manager at Pha Kluai Mai – running along my running route. He told me he had started running 3km everyday in the evenings. Not long after that encounter, Jambee told me our neighbour Baw had started running along the road near our houses where Muak runs in the evenings. So it turns out, the men weren’t running with me, but they had started to run after all.
Tong-Sai, Baw’s younger brother, is another one of my neighbours. He’s really shy and quiet, but always happy and seems genuinely content with life at all times. He doesn’t say much, but asks about running when I stop to talk to him. Once I invited him to come running with me, but he explained: though he wanted to run, he couldn’t because of a heart condition. Jambee explained further but the Thai was pretty complex, so I’m not sure of the details.
Tonight Jambee and Bahn went to the Monday Market, but I said I didn’t want to go because I wanted to run instead. I ran 10km back and forth on the old golf course (my usual running route in the evenings), during my run I met up with three woman walking, and a tourist who comes to bike here often who, incidentally, I found out tonight, has a brother living in Vancouver that owns a Thai restaurant “Siam Thai” and has traveled to Victoria, Vancouver, Lake Louise, Banff, Toronto and Quebec. And as I was finishing off my final lap of 2km, much to my wonder and surprise, I met TONG-SAI jogging lightly along the path. He ran/walked back and forth just once (2.5km). I nearly exploded I was bursting with so much joy to see him trying and doing what he could!
---
It’s been about 1 year and 9 months since I moved into the majestic Khao Yai National Park to begin my dissertation research on white-handed gibbons and pig-tailed macaques. As most of you know from following my blog, or chatting with me for more than 5 seconds, it’s been a pretty amazing expedition and I’ve been blessed to be surrounded by wonderful people and given tremendous opportunities while living here.
Running at Khao Yai was a simple commitment that I made to myself before I even got here. I don’t run for other people; I just do it for myself. If no one ever went with me, that’d be Ok. I’d keep trying as best I could. I never expected anyone here to run with me or be interested in it. In fact, prior to coming here, I thought Thai people would think it to be very “unfeminine” and see me as a foolish, brutish foreigner trying to be strong like a man instead of soft like a lady. But since I started running here so many months ago, I have been astounded to see how this small commitment I made to myself grew into something much bigger than me around the park. This has led me to the following conclusion:
If you think what you do doesn’t matter, think again. Even if it’s just something you do for yourself, we are all connected, we are primates – this makes us social creatures, this makes us matter to each other, so we pay attention to each other. And even when you think no one is watching, your seemingly small efforts to improve yourself could be the spark that ignites the fire inside one other person that will lead to numerous others.
All it takes is one person, doing what they can, showing it can be done, and putting in the effort… to influence many.
"Be the change you want to see in the world." - Ghandi
Tweet Follow @primejm Tweet to @primejm
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