Breathing

After a whole week of days with temperatures between -25 and -30 (feeling as if -40) I had become annoyed and restless.
Breathing and walking becomes difficult outside. The air is too cold to inhale and I normally start coughing when I step outside of the door.
Walking becomes dangerous, and I, now more than ever, admire the countless women on high heels!! Several times a day I see myself almost going down. It happens just like that, walking straight, and there you go…luckily I often find my balance just on time…either way causing a short heart attack. And I am not the only one, have seen many people going through the same….the pavement simply gets too slippery when it is below -20.
Anyways, I decided to go to the gym. (I used to run rounds in the a sport complex in front of my building, but over Christmas they introduced a health check-up before entering the building. So no more running indoors I thought, I will run outside from now on.
Well, not this week…)
The gym (in the middle of the city): a friendly and organised place, with lots of classes and different activities (for those interested: they have a striptease class Tuesday evening ;)).
I started with a class of pilates. Nothing exciting persé, however I now definitely know how to say, ‘Breath in, Breath out’, in Russian, other than that I had to watch and copy the teacher, cause I haven’t reached technical terms and muscles yet in my Russian language classes.
I then went running on one those machines and could observe how Russians park their car on zebra’s (where is that allowed??), how young and old start crossing the street walking slowly but quickly speed up their pace in fear of being run over, how people approached the little church in the middle of ‘Red Prospect’ (the so-called geographical centre of the Russian Federation), making crosses but also how most busses emit a scary big cloud of something very unhealthy….
In finished in the sauna, a 105 Celsius, almost too hot, and which made it hard to breath!