The first morning in a new city, everyone else is asleep. This is the best hour of the trip and most travellers spend it unconscious.
Go out and run instead. Not far, not fast. Forty minutes, no route, no plan beyond a vague sense of which direction the river is in.
What you get back is out of all proportion to the effort. In forty minutes you’ll cover six or seven kilometres, which is most of an afternoon’s walking, and you’ll do it before the queues form and the tour groups arrive. You pass the famous square when there are three people in it. You get the light nobody photographs because they’re at breakfast.
More usefully, the geography clicks. Cities make no sense from a metro map. You emerge from underground, look at a monument, go back down and emerge somewhere else, and after three days you have a collection of unconnected fragments. Run between them once and the whole thing assembles itself. You learn that the old town is ten minutes from the park, that the hill you keep seeing is closer than it looks, and that the river bends in a way the map never conveyed.
Hilly cities gain the most from this. Lisbon barely makes sense from a tram window. The Lisbon Half Marathon sidesteps the issue by dropping off a bridge and hugging the water, but on foot at 7am you can go up into it instead, and the city rearranges itself in your head by breakfast.
You also see the city doing its actual work. Bakery deliveries. Market traders setting up crates. Someone hosing down the pavement outside a bar that was heaving eight hours earlier. None of this appears in a guidebook because none of it is an attraction, and it is invariably the thing you remember.
The practicalities are easy. Head for water if there is any, since rivers and seafronts are flat, obvious, and hard to get lost on. Parks are the other safe bet. Run out for twenty minutes and walk back if you want to properly look at something. Take a note of the hotel name, because street names in an unfamiliar alphabet leave the memory alarmingly fast.
And if you like it, there’s a whole culture built on this. Parkrun runs in more than twenty countries on Saturday mornings and it’s free. Most cities have a running club that welcomes drop-ins. Some people go further and start planning a trip around a race, which is a fine way to end up somewhere you’d never otherwise have booked.
Set an alarm. You can sleep at home.
