AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit Jogging at the Royal Bangkok Sports Club — a far cry from sprinting in Baghdad.

Anlong Veng, in the sticks of northwest Cambodia, ranks high on the surreal scale among the many places on four continents where I've laced up my running shoes. But then there was one of Saddam Hussein's pleasure palaces in Baghdad, Rwanda just after the tribal massacres, the cow-dung strewn stadium ringed by 100,000 refugees in northern Albania...

At Anlong Veng, I jogged by a primary school, chirping with happy kids about to head home. It was built by Ta Mok, a local hero, buried a week earlier, known to the outside world as "The Butcher" for the atrocities he committed as a Khmer Rouge commander.

In the near-distance, under a threatening monsoon sky, rose the Dangrek Mountains, a thickly jungled range where the dying Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and his top lieutenants hid out as their murderous movement reeled toward apocalypse in the late 1980s.

"Where you go?" hailed smiling roadside vendors. Two boys on a motorcycle pulled up next to me for some English conversation practice on the run. Another pair nearly crashed their motorcycle as they both turned back to stare with bewildered amusement.

Anlong Veng is no. 122 on my log of locations -- exhilarating, splendid, sometimes risky -- where I've tried to keep reasonably fit while on the road reporting for The Associated Press or on my own vacation time.

The first entry dates back to 1984 as some of Southeast Asia's better unspecified but plentiful temptations started to get the best of me -- and my waistline. That's when photojournalist John Everingham, a close friend who wrestled pythons as a youngster in the Australian Outback, uttered words for which I will forever be grateful: "You better get back into shape. And there's only one efficient way to do it in the free time you and I have -- jog."

Pounding out mile after boring mile had always seemed about as much fun as figuring out logarithm tables. Track had been my worst sport in school by far.

So when I embarked on my road to rehabilitation, I tried to sweeten the ordeal or set my mind on automatic pilot. I fantasized about some of those temptations, crafted leads to stories and kept meticulous records of best times and longest distances run. I practiced a kind of Buddhist meditation, focusing solely on one movement, like every other footfall of my right leg, to block out the ennui and aches.

Gradually, I found myself being won over, then converted, finally addicted and was soon packing my jogging gear to just about any destination. An internal alarm clock also traveled along.

So when, for example, a late afternoon salvo of Bulgarian rockets hit Camp Warhorse, where I was embedded with U.S. forces, I grew fidgety and extremely upset with the Iraqi insurgents who had aborted my planned jog.

Probably my most ego-boosting one came in Iraq, at a nasty city called Najaf where I was hunkered down inside a smelly, high-walled, machine-gun nested compound with troops of the elite 82nd Airborne Division. They averaged a third my age.

"Not bad -- for a journalist," one of them called out, watching me shuffle through a carpet of desert sand. He and his buddies were huddled in the shade, lazily drinking Coke, cleaning their M-16s and grumbling about the gagging heat.

Whatever the obvious dangers of war zone jogging, I found over the years that dogs and golf have proved to be more consistently hazardous.

The rabbies-infected canines that roam in many Asian parts are definitely not a jogger's best friend. Some will bark, bare teeth and occasionally charge a runner so I arm myself with a stone or two when mangy mutts are expected along my route (one friend, twice bitten by the same neighborhood dog in Bangkok, finally terminated it with extreme prejudice).

I don't really blame the dogs, suddenly confronted with a towering stranger emitting, to them, exotic and undoubtedly foul odors. Or for that matter the toddlers in remote villages who have run screaming into their mothers' arms as my pale-skinned body lumbered near (some, as I have come to learn, believe they are seeing a ghost).

Golf balls are the main menace on my own, home jogging ground — the Royal Bangkok Sports Club, a marvelous, green oasis smack in the middle of the traffic-plagued urban jungle that Thailand's capital has become. Unfortunately for those who don't like the game — I hate it — the club encloses a nine-hole golf course through which the jogging track runs.

Use of the track dropped dramatically after it was reliably rumored that a jogger had been struck, losing half his family jewels to a hurtling golf ball.

Perhaps I've tended to highlight the Adrenalin-inducing hellholes. In truth, my jogging world has encompassed moments, nay countless hours, of sheer joy and beauty, the pace of a run, the visual and sensual all-surround intensifying the experience of a tropical beach, a mountainscape or a park in Paris.

You don't get goose bumps speeding across the Sydney Harbor Bridge in a taxi but I did, enveloped by cool and briny breezes, glimpsing the white caps far below -- as I celebrated the end of the 2000 Olympics with a jog across that icon of Australia.

What can match winding one's way into a quintessential English village on a summer evening, rabbits scampering across a path through an archway of greenery, the church graveyard where generations sleep, a thatch-roofed pub where I will soon feel less guilty about downing a pint or two of oak-aged ale.

I've also huffed and puffed into the past. In Zagreb, Croatia, alphabetically last on my still expanding list of "Places Jogged," it's I who thought I'd seen a ghost while passing by a quarter frozen in time. It was my grandfather, dapper in a white linen suit, lounging in a fin de siecle sidewalk cafe of a city he would visit during the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Now, I'm on the homeward stretch in Anlong Veng, forced to peer into the well of memory, and out of it rise images of the executioners -- some likely these very smiling citizens around me -- and their shattered victims.

Among those were many friends, perhaps the bravest and most loyal ones I've ever known. We covered the Cambodian War together, before they perished at the orders of Anlong Veng's killers in the reign of terror that followed. In mid-stride, I raised my right hand to salute them all.

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Here are some tips for staying fit on the road:

1. Pack the essentials — Running shoes, socks, shorts and tops, plus sunscreen and hat. Some climes can be brutal to the body.

2. Loner or joiner? — If you like company on your jogs, make some contacts before arrival, like the Hash House Harriers, with more than 1,700 chapters from Afghanistan to Yemen. Other jogging fraternities can be found on the Internet or guide books.

3. Are the natives friendly? — Normally they are. I drew the line at non-U.S. military guarded areas of Iraq and just about anywhere in Somalia. The mean streets of Johannesburg might also qualify.

4. Get the lay of the land: Best outdoor jogging areas are parks, school sports fields, stadiums which allow access, riverside promenades, beaches, country roads. Avoid city streets and highways. They're often polluted and populated by insane drivers.

5. No, well, almost no excuses: Travel can be a great excuse for wavering joggers. Pare these down to ones like severe diarrhea, a 24-hour interview with the country's president or a decidedly hostile environment. Otherwise hit the road.

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asap contributor Denis D. Gray is The Associated Press bureau chief for Southeast Asia.

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