Marathon effort.

Despite being top of the list when it comes to the world’s most crowded places, many of Asia’s capital cities are surprisingly pleasant places for a morning run.

Hong Kong has its mountainous country parks. Singapore has its beachside running tracks, its forest paths and its thousands of clean, runner-friendly streets.

But in Bangkok, you can forget about looking for leafy parks, oxygen-rich forests, and rocky mountain paths, because there aren’t any.

There are of course a couple of token green spaces, which I’m sure must have been pleasant at some point in history. But plodding around Lumpini or Benjasiri, with their wobbly bike-riders, mad plastic souvenir sellers and out-of-tune early morning pensioners’ karaoke groups, is not my idea of fun.

I find the best running option in the Thai capital is simply to forget any thought of being at one with nature, bite the bullet and go urban.

Running through the crowded back sois keeps you on your toes and adds another element to your exercise as you dodge tuk tuks, leap out of the path of Red Bull-fuelled motorbike riders and outrun stray street dogs who feel you have encroached on their precious patch of filth.

What’s more, the interesting morning activities of the Thais, who seem to live their lives in public when in their own neighbourhoods, give you something to look at and make your exertions pass quickly.

After you have ran past women getting their hair done in the street before work, at stalls next to butchers chopping up ducks for lunch and dentists in shop windows operating on their patients in full view of passers by, there’s a remote possibility that you’ll always feel something is lacking when you hit the trails in your nearest tropical forest or deserted country park.