China

When I started planning my recent trip to China, I knew I wanted to visit Chengdu to see China’s famous giant pandas. Most tourists go to the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Base to catch a glimpse of this endangered animal, but the base doesn’t offer any opportunities to get up close and personal with […]

I kicked off my recent trip to China with two days in Hong Kong, but I have to admit, I wasn’t particularly excited about the stop. I pictured Hong Kong being nothing more than a crowded city full of skyscrapers with little of cultural interest to me. Indeed, many of the recommendations I got from

As I slowly dragged one foot in front of the other, I could feel my calf muscles strain and tighten. I was running on relatively flat ground, on black asphalt, but it felt like I was pushing myself uphill. I thought back to the prior few days – a five-hour walking tour around Beijing, an

At this time next week, I will be in Hong Kong! It’s been a few months since I’ve left the country and this trip has snuck up on me a bit. Running the Great Wall Marathon has been on my bucket list for years and when I started making plans to finally do it, it

Four weeks from today I will embark on what will be perhaps my greatest physical challenge: running the Great Wall Marathon in China. Sure, I’ve completed seven previous marathons, two of them in temperatures reaching the mid-80s. Sure, I hiked rim-to-rim in the Grand Canyon in temperatures close to 100 degrees. And sure, I hiked