Hot, Sweaty, and Humbled in Hanoi
Moving beyond performative fitness and seeing the often invisible strength of everyday life
The oppressive heat is pressing down on me. The endless sounds of hustle and bustle of a city quite literally bursting at its seams with life. Explosions of colour, movement and things (so many things) distract my eyes. While the smells of just another coffee place fill my nose so distinctly I can literally taste them in my mouth. This is Hanoi, a city so alive it almost hurts.
I am on the tail-end of three weeks of work travel from the sunny beaches of Mallorca for my company's offsite, to the formality of business suits and business meetings with business people in Jakarta. I am now on my last leg and sitting at a hipster coffee shop in a relatively quiet street in Hanoi trying to forcefully let go of the work woes that have seeped into every crevice of my being.
I had a simple plan. Proof and post a piece I wrote on one of the many flights I have been on lately. I have been feeling rather anxious and annoyed that I missed last week's HerPace, not wanting to break the habit I am building or the momentum I hope I am creating with some of you.
The piece was inspired by my current circumstances of traveling and trying to navigate food decisions. I was inspired to write a piece about food culture. It focused on how during our childhood family and upbringing a set values and habits are around food are formed that tend to govern our behaviour as adults. A piece I affectionately called "food facts for fatties" (working title) is an exploration, nay confessional, on my utter lack of nutritional knowledge and the several guiding principles I have learned as a late 30-something that I am trying to implement even while travelling. But Hanoi, in all its unrelenting immediacy, refused to be ignored. The piece I had planned started to feel irrelevant - or at least, incomplete.
So here I sit immersed and distinctly ex-patriated in a place that demands to be lived, to be tasted, and to be written about. And suddenly, all my careful plans feel small. I’m struck not by food anxiety or routine guilt, but by the awe of being in a body that can move through the world. I’m reminded of the sheer privilege of physicality, and of waking up with legs that carry me, a heart that beats steady, a gut that feels hunger, and lungs that inhale this thick, fragrant, foreign air.
So much of fitness culture turns the body into a problem to be solved and a plan to be performed. But here, now, in the crush of motorbikes and mangoes; endless incense and noise. I don’t want a plan. I want presence. I don’t want control. I want connection.
If you haven’t been, Hanoi is a city in constant motion with scooters buzzing past, street vendors calling out ,and life spilling out from every corner. Sidewalks to easily stroll along are hard to come by. The humidity begins and ends before any logical person can rise from their slumber. And the pollution makes being outside less than desirable. It is truly an art form to remain poised while sweat pours from your face (and let's be honest your posterior).
With my “Western mindset” toward fitness I’ve traversed the streets here (and in Jakarta last week) scanning for parks or pavements where I might run or do a workout. And with the small-mindedness of my whiteness, I’ve huffed in quiet frustration at the challenge of doing so. My carefully crafted strength and fitness plan (one I smugly built back home) has been waylaid by the physicality, density, and rhythm of a life that doesn’t resemble mine. What an absolutely entitled prig I am!
But here's the thing: it made me question the entire premise. Who am I when I can’t access my perfectly optimised morning routine? What is strength if it only exists under perfect conditions like a yoga mat, a green juice, and a curated gym playlist? Why is fitness something I expect the world to accommodate, rather than something that should adapt to the world?
Maybe real strength isn’t about reps or steps. Maybe it’s about resilience in unfamiliar terrain, grace in discomfort, or learning to listen in a place that isn’t speaking your language.
When I look around, I may not see the same performance or expression of fitness I am used to from the streets and ways of London life. There are fewer joggers, fewer walkers in activewear, fewer gym-goers (though there are some). While I don’t see performance - fitness chic in motion- what I do see is presence. Movement woven into daily living. Strength that doesn’t announce itself, but simply gets on with it. People in Hanoi have different ways and methods of moving and being that flows in, and around the flows of traffic and changes in seasons.
Their motion is woven into the city’s pulse: bending, carrying, crouching, weaving through traffic, adjusting with the rhythms of the season and the street. Looking around I don't actually see what in the West we might call "unhealthy bodies". The visible aesthetic of fitness culture that I realise I have internalised.
Looking around Hanoi I see a kaleidoscope of ways of being active, of moving, and of being strong. A woman in her traditional nón lá (hat) carries the weight of her families livelihood quite literally in her arms as she hawks to passer-buyers. A somewhat dashing young man, all lean muscle and slight physique, rides his bicycle to work, to home, to somewhere, and everywhere. Middle-aged women practice tai chi and dance near the lake in the early morning hours. Families play ping pong in the parks. Security guards kick around a hacky sack as they watch over doorways. There is a beautiful, quiet, and ever-present rhythm of movement here. It is an embodied strength that runs through the city’s lifeblood that is not branded, scheduled, or broadcasted on social media. It just is.
In looking beyond the physicality I am used to I realise that the bodies and modalities I associate with health, fitness and strength do not actually necessitate the endurance and vitality required to carry one through life physically or emotionally. What I, and most, associate with strength - the muscles built in gyms, or defined by reformer beds- are ultimately for show. This type of performative fitness and strength is a privilege of those with the money and time to invest in themselves- rather than a need to survive, to endure, and to provide for others.
Why is that we live in a world where the physicality of the fit is mostly revered, while the physicality that comes from hard work, real work- maybe even a touch of poverty- is something that is reviled?
Navigating the streets of Hanoi, I’ve seen more casual six (to eight-packs) in the past week than I have in years living in London. Not gym-sculpted bodies but muscle born of movement, routine, and real life. Not from supplements or macros, but from cycling through traffic, hauling crates, crouching, squatting, rising again. Bodies beautiful in their flexibility and dexterity that the best pilates classes in London couldn't buy you. Strength that lives in the tendons and joints, in balance and agility. And what strikes me most is this is a strength I can't achieve through programs, plans, and PRs. It is here and it is the lived and breathed bodies of being alive. Of living a life that is not defined behind a computer screen or at the gym.
This week was meant to be week one of my marathon training plan. But I’ve been tired and strung out from weeks of work with no weekends, no stillness. I was honestly frustrated. Quietly raging at this city, these circumstances, for interfering with my goals. I know, I know - what a wanker.
I came here clinging to control with plans, pace charts, and the illusion that discipline equals worth. But this city, in its unapologetic fullness, didn’t make room for my spreadsheet. Now that I’m here, coconut latte in hand (it's a Vietnamese thing), finally seeing the people and place around me. And in that stillness, the volume of my own entitlement has risen rather loud and humbling. So instead of sharing thoughts on food culture wars, my meandering marathon memo or complaining about a missing training session, I want to offer a quieter note to the joyous chaos of Hanoian life.
I’m learning to be grateful for the heat, the horns, and the rhythm of a city that doesn’t slow down for anyone. It hushes the voice in my head that says I should be doing more. I feel myself release the tension between discipline and surrender, performance and presence. For a moment, I am simply here.
I sip my drink, feeling the sweat on my back and my heart considerably more steady than when the day began. I breathe in the dust and sweetness and see it, all.
A strength that isn’t scheduled or strategized.
It’s something carried without performance, without applause - every day.
The horns quiet me. The heat slows me. Hanoi fills me.
And for a moment, I am free.
xo
Milena, I absolutely LOVED this. Read every single word this morning and savoured each one! The messages so resonated with me that I am sure you speak the I said for so many of us.
Keep going, keep inspiring, keep writing!
Stephanie
(We met at the recent Femtech event last month).
And last thing, these lines have got to be my favourite: ‘There is a beautiful, quiet, and ever-present rhythm of movement here. It is an embodied strength that runs through the city’s lifeblood that is not branded, scheduled, or broadcasted on social media. It just is.’
Just delicious!!!!