Travel does strange things to your body.
You sit more than you think. Airports, buses, trains, cafés, co-working spaces. Hours disappear in chairs. You eat when food is available, not when hunger arrives properly. Coffee becomes structural. Sleep depends on curtains you did not choose and mattresses you did not test.
After a few weeks, something shifts. Your shoulders angle forward. Your hips tighten. Climbing stairs feels slightly different. Not painful. Just heavier.
No one photographs that version.
The worst stretch for me was Tbilisi in winter. Cold that didn’t stay outside. The heating in my apartment worked technically, but the room never fully warmed. I stopped crossing the neighborhood. The bakery downstairs became the outer edge of my world. Groceries arrived in plastic bags. Work filled the hours. It felt efficient.
Ten days passed before I noticed the difference properly. I stood up from the chair and my hips resisted. My back felt older than it should have. I wasn’t ill. I hadn’t injured anything. I had just narrowed my movement to the distance between bed, desk, and kettle.
I went outside without a plan. One block. The next day, a little further. The air was still sharp, the sidewalks still icy, but something loosened. Not dramatically. Gradually.
Walking Until It Sneaks Up on You
In Colombo, months later, I checked my distance after what I would have described as a slow day. Twelve kilometers. I hadn’t set out to train. I had simply kept refusing tuk-tuks. Turned down the shorter street. Chosen the longer edge of the park. The heat pressed down. Traffic filled the air. By evening, my legs felt used in a way that made sense.
Other cities make stillness easy. Air conditioning persuades you to stay seated. Cafés are designed to hold you for hours. When that becomes routine, I feel it within a week. Sleep shifts. Mood tightens. Small irritations get louder.
The Hotel Gym Pattern
I have opened enough hotel gym doors to recognize the pattern. A treadmill that sounds slightly unstable. A pair of dumbbells that don’t match. Fluorescent lighting that makes everyone look more tired than they are. I use them sometimes. Mostly, I close the door and go back upstairs.
The most reliable workouts I’ve had happened in rooms barely large enough for my suitcase. Furniture pushed aside. Push-ups until my arms trembled. Squats until my legs burned slightly. A plank held longer than I wanted to. No music. No mirror. Just breath and the floor.
Nothing about it felt impressive. It simply kept something from stiffening.
Transit Days
A ten-hour bus ride undoes things quietly. So does a long-haul flight followed by immigration lines, followed by a taxi, followed by a chair. The compression accumulates. Now, when I arrive somewhere new, I walk before unpacking. Even if it is late. Even if I am tired. I circle the block, note the sounds, feel the pavement under my feet.
If I skip that, the next morning carries the weight of it.
Food in Context
I do not travel to monitor calories. That has never interested me. But three days of fried food and sugar in a row changes how I move. Rice and curry can feel balanced or excessive depending on what keeps landing on the plate. Street food can feel light or punishing. The difference is rarely the cuisine. It is repetition.
Some weeks drift toward excess. Others settle into something steadier.
Sleep Is the First Thing to Slip
Curtains that fail at dawn. Street noise past midnight. Early departures layered on late arrivals. Sleep thins out first. When that happens, everything else follows — movement, patience, appetite. I have learned to carry earplugs before protein bars.
The Southwest Coast of Sri Lanka
There were months on the southwest coast of Sri Lanka when my routine barely changed. Wake early. Coffee. Walk the same stretch of road past Weligama before the heat thickened. Some mornings the ocean lay flat and metallic. November through March, the surf rolled in hard and clean, the coastline fully awake without making a show of it.
The same vendor setting up plastic chairs. The same dogs asleep in the sand. The same bend in the road where shade arrived a little earlier in the afternoon. Some days I swam. Some days I didn’t. But the walking remained.
Nothing about it looked like a program. Over time, it simply felt easier to move than not to.
Travel doesn’t automatically strengthen you. It doesn’t automatically erode you either. It magnifies habits. When I start shrinking into chairs again — too much screen, too many cafés, too little daylight — I notice the early signs now.
I go outside. No performance. Just space and distance, until my body remembers itself.
Ramon
