Being abroad has encouraged me to take up running again. It has been near four years since stopping on Christmas Day 2004 in Saint-Dizier, France, for no specific reason.

It is hard to run in Bulgaria. Physical excuses are the easiest to come by: the roads, pavements are horrid, and will lead to a broken ankle; street dogs will see a runner as a moving target and attack; the air pollution is bad enough for one's lungs already; there is nowhere safe to run without a likely full-body encounter with a moving motor vehicle.

But the hardest to overcome is mental (at least for me): no one else here runs.

Wait, I take that back. There have been a couple times that I have seen pairs of random women in makeshift exercise-type clothing lugging their way around Zaimov Park. Never the same women twice, though.

Too bad. No one else here of legal age wears blue-striped knee socks, either.

Truth is, I only know one other person here who runs, and she, too, is a foreigner.  She, too, said that she has rarely seen anyone jogging on the streets.

It started because of the vacation – spending half of one's day on a riverboat with often limited amounts of time on shore (and thus limited physical movement) encouraged the making use of the ship's treadmill. (Note: playing with one's iPod while attempting to run on a treadmill can be dangerous to one's health.)

Ok, often limited times off the boat, and a cool guy – the boat's sous chef – from Montenegro who also happened to frequent the fitness room. (Like you expect me to survive two weeks of contact only with 118 Americans with an average age of 75?)

Whatever the real reason that I kept on running, it turned that I still enjoyed it, and, it could be said, even would miss the pure physical satisfaction of the step-step-step-step once the holiday had ended.

(And, there is nothing like a good sweat to make one feel really cleansed.)

So, upon returning, I started running outdoors, inspired by the Germans we would see running along the quays while docked at a given port, never mind the supposed physical dangers that Bulgaria poses. After all, it was the mental hindrance that was the greatest.

Mental hindrance is something that I do not accept. And so I started running, planning mentally ahead of time (one has to put oneself to sleep somehow, nali?) the route to take, and realised that the wide boulevards on the outskirts of Sofia's centre were not that hard to come by, or that far away, and that, at the almost ungodly hour of 8am, they would not be too full of staring pedestrians or nasty leering males.

So I started running, down Madrid Boulevard to Botevgradsko Chaussée to specifically, the intersection of another large boulevard and улица "Васил Кънчев" 40/ulica Vasil Kanchev 40, as per the large blue sign posted in front of a tiling supply (or something of the sort) store.

I started running, and the only people who stared gave looks of surprised encouragement, or wonder.

If nothing else, perhaps this will serve to inspire others who dare not to do the same.

And it is lovely, and the supposed pollution (or perhaps that is plainly a superstition along the lines of the dangers of drinking tap water) did not choke me up, no dogs followed me, the pavements did not lead to a broken ankle and the only mental challenge was to ignore the sun's potential contribution to skin cancer somewhere down the line.

Are you interested now, too?