On one of my first days at Yahoo, I looked around and realized that I was staring into my own future unless I took immediate corrective action. As much as I admired my co-worker's craftsmanship, I did not want to end up carving my own Gandalf walking staff to assist my overtaxed legs in getting me onto the wide-seated commuter shuttle.

Thankfully, San Francisco proved to be one of the most pleasant places in the world for outdoor exercise. Now that I have moved out of the Bay Area, I wanted to pass along three secrets that I was much too stingy to share while still a resident.

1. San Francisco Outdoor Fitness

Fitness 'boot camps' are proliferating in the city. Most of them involve four-to-six week intensive programs where you pay several hundred dollars in exchange for morning calisthenics and the chance to have an instructor look at a food diary and tell you to cut out the burritos.

Hidden among these boot camps is an outfit called SF Outdoor Fitness, a deceptively low-key fitness cult that for a hundred bucks a month got me fitter than I had ever hoped to be. The cult leader, Mike, is a former college football player with a sunny disposition and a strong desire to climb. I don't believe there is a hill or staircase in the city that he is not intimately familiar with the top of.

The group meets three times a week in Dolores Park, is full of friendly regulars (not the overstressed financial types who seem drawn to the more expensive groups), and gives you a chance to see some lovely hidden corners of the city. A typical workout includes a three mile run, some pushups and abdominal exercises, and mild resistance training using a partner. The trick is holding out for the first two weeks. In recognition of the attrition rate, the first three sessions are free. Runs on Saturdays cost nothing but hurt much more.

2. The Six Tax Bracket Run

This is a perfect longer (6.0 mile) run for anyone staying in a downtown San Francisco hotel, or near a BART stop. Beginning on Market St, run towards Civic Center, follow Leavenworth north all the way to the water, then take a right and run along the Embarcadero until you return to the foot of Market Street, completing the loop. This run starts in the heart of the Tenderloin, San Francisco's most visually unforgettable neighborhood, and climbs rapidly uphill both topographically and socioeconomically for around two miles. The nearly linear relationship between altitude and per-capita income breaks down as you crest the hill and descend towards the Marina, San Francisco's answer to Orange County. In a rare display of cosmic justice, the Marina is also the part of the city most likely to sink without a trace into freshly-liquefied sands when the Big One hits. Pick out your favorite plot of land now!

This is a very taxing run if you are not used to hills, but the pain is front-loaded. There are two long climbs and sharp descents along Leavenworth, and then you have a completely flat return along the Bay, giving your legs a chance to recover and hopefully not seize up completely once you've stopped moving.

If you are used to hill running, consider turning left at the water and running through pretty Fort Mason, then returning to Market St. via Laguna (Divisadero for the hardcore) and Geary. This is hilly in both directions, but does not require slaloming through waterfront tourists. The Laguna route is also 6 miles; Divisadero is 7.5.

Whichever route you take, there are beautiful views from the crests towards Alcatraz, the Bay Bridge, and the hills south of the city, though you are more likely to have your attention caught by your freshly-expelled lungs, which will look surprisingly purple and dark against the sparkly concrete of the sidewalk.

3. The W Hotel Gym

Gyms in the Bay Area tend to be very expensive. If all you want is a place to lift some barbells, do some resistance training or possibly go for a swim, skip the costly day passes and go to the fourth floor of the W hotel at 3rd and Howard. Exiting the elevator, you'll see a spa desk with bored attendants — ignore them and stride confidently to the right. The door to the gym requires a key card to open, but you can stand across from it, out of view, and pretend to fiddle with your phone until an arriving or departing legit cardholder lets you in. As long as you look plausibly like a hotel guest, no one at the W will hassle you.

Inside the gym is a full set of free weights, treadmills, resistance machines and fluffy white towels; there's also a very nice shower. If you can get someone to let through the inner atrium door, you can go swimming in a small rooftop pool or sit in the Jacuzzi. Often one or both of these doors are left propped open, making it even easier to get in.

If you visit the W facilities, please do be considerate and keep it low-key, in order to keep this precious natural resource usable by others (that is, myself) for years to come. And if you know of other hotel gyms in big cities that are easy to get into, I'd love to hear about it by email.

There is nothing distinctive about the Polish border with Ukraine. This part of the world sits on an endless, invasion-friendly plain crisscrossed by rivers that meander around without a clear sense of purpose before giving up in exasperation and draining into the Baltic or Black Sea. Historically, borders here have not counted for much. If you had horses, archers and an acquisitive nature, you could pretty much go where you wanted.

Part of the border follows a wadable little river called the Bug, while the rest is just a notional line drawn across indifferent potato fields. Yet despite appearances, this is one of the hardest-working borders on the continent.

To the west lies the European Union, a land of gingerbread cities and rolling fields made of spun gold. Cross the border here and you can drive to Portugal, Germany, France, or even Switzerland without even having to show your driver's license. On the other side is Ukraine, a struggling country whose economy has not been seen in some weeks, hasn't been answering the phone, and whose neighbors fear the worst.

From the Polish perspective, the border with Ukraine is the only thing separating a God-fearing people from the Wild East, a land of car smugglers, bandits, traffickers, Gypsies, Turks, Mongols, and other con men scheming to drain the country of its modest wealth. During the early nineties, there was an impressive flow of stolen cars from Germany that crossed Poland from West to East like a trail of ants returning from a particularly sumptuous picnic, masterminded (of course) by the remaining Soviet troops stationed in Poland, in a powerful demonstration that the entrepreneurial spirit as applied to theft could survive seventy years of communism. It used to be routine for trucks to spend from three days to a week waiting at the Ukrainian border, their various illicit cargoes banging at the walls of their prison, or else softly irradiating their surroundings with gamma rays.

From the Ukrainian point of view, the Polish border is another example of self-important Poles trying to lord it over everybody. Historically, Poles in the east were landowners, nobility and gentry, while Ukrainians and Ruthenians were the ones who actually tilled the soil, while being denied their own language and culture. Those resentments simmer on. The great villain of one of Poland's most popular works of historical fiction is the Ukrainian national hero.

Lviv is only 340 kilometers away from Warsaw, but travel options between the two cities are grim. Panzer divisions can make the journey faster than the Odessa-Warsaw train, which has to make a prolonged border stop in order to be picked clean of smuggled cigarettes and have its wheels resized to fit the narrower European track gauge. Buses must contend with two-lane roads that were never designed for the level of traffic they see, and that feature all the entertainments of the Slavic road network - bad pavement, frequent accidents, a roundabout in every village, drunken bicyclists, the occasional horse-drawn vehicle, and underpowered, overloaded old cars blocking everyone else's way. A few dozen kilometers of limited access, divided highway have been built in Poland over the past decade, but none of it leads to Ukraine.

The train and bus station in Lviv resembles a Serengeti watering hole in time of drought. Buses of all shapes and sizes eye each other warily, emitting great clouds of steam while trying to squeeze into the same small paved area. The arrivals area looks like a traffic jam frozen in time. Most of the buses are local, including an inordinate number of pink striped boxy buses headed to mysterious "SAMARA". Around the edges of the frozen traffic jam extends a portable service economy of kiosks and tents selling the necessities for a long trip like this: cookies and biscuits, hamburgers of the second freshness, breaded mystery cutlets, bottled water and juice, hot tea, Armenian cognac and a veritable United Nations of vodkas.

The morning bus to Warsaw is scheduled for 10:15, but it is nowhere to be found. The temperature on the platform hovers right around freezing, and the sky cannot seem to make up its mind between snowing and shining down a kind of pale, imitation sunlight. There are no signs among the bewildering chaos of vehicles to suggest where the Warsaw bus might be expected to arrive, so I wander around until I hear some Polish on the platform and ascertain from other stranded passengers that this is the correct place to wait. Then, in the proud tradition of Polish travelers stuck anywhere, we start bitching.

Centuries of ineptitude, misrule, corruption and outright chaos have not dimmed the Polish zeal for bitching. Listening to the cries of indignant exasperation and appeals to logic and reason on the bus platform one might think that we had lived all our lives in Switzerland, and had only this morning been thrust into a situation where a public service did not run smoothly or provide us with timely, accurate information.

In fact, the Lviv-Warsaw bus schedule is designed to make it impossible for the bus to arrive on time. The coach comes straight from Warsaw, with no allowance in the schedule for the four-hour border delay, and the drivers don't carry cell phones to communicate with the central office. The only way to know roughly how far away the bus is is by calling a spotter at the border, who can report on whether or not it has passed through customs.

Nerves are a little bit taut. It is the day before Christmas Eve, the day when all of Poland will shut down for a week. The people stomping their feet to stay warm are anxious about getting to Warsaw tonight, making connections. I talk for a while with a Polish woman who is making her way home from Georgia, where she serves in the European equivalent of the Peace Corps. She has to make a train connection in Warsaw and can't be late. After another forty minutes with no sign of the bus, we confer and decide to put her on the little minibus known as a marshrutka that runs to the nearby border crossing at Sheheni, where pedestrians can cross on foot. She has a better chance of getting from there to nearby Przemysl and catching a Warsaw-bound train.

This border crossing used to be infamous for its overwhelming foot traffic. Cigarettes are far cheaper in Ukraine than in the European Union, and locals colloquially known as 'ants' would make dozens of trips a day, bringing in the maximum allowance of cigarettes each time. These could be sold cash in local bars and cafes. This cross-border trade was the province of Ukrainians, until the black day when Poland imposed a 35 euro visa fee. Then Polish old ladies and young ne'er-do-wells took over. It was one of very few ways to make a decent income in the least-developed part of the country. In December, Poland reduced the duty-free cigarette allowance from one carton to two packs, bringing this form of entrepreneurship to a halt. There were furious protests, complete with thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails, at this knife thrust in the back of small business. But it at least made the border passable.

When the bus arrives, it is briefly the happiest place on earth. We settle in and a bearded Ukrainian agent takes roll call. The drivers are two older Polish men, one with an enormous paunch and the other with a faint resemblance to the late John Paul II. They have driven directly from Warsaw, spelling each other, and are now going to drive directly back. The bus rolls slowly through the heart of Lviv - a lovely city that merits its own post - and within a half hour has reached the monotonous tank country that makes up western Ukraine. We drive past men still picking late cabbages in one field, one of them cutting off their heads and throwing them up to a second, positioned in the back of a cart. The sun is shining from the highest point it will reach that day, just above the trees on the southern horizon.

In an hour or so there is a blooming of kiosks and billboards advertising the last chance to buy Ukrainian before the Polish border, and then we pass a very, very long line of passenger cars. The bus parks and one of the drivers goes off to find a customs agent. This is how we spend our first hour.

A vast gulf of fashion separates Polish and Ukrainian border guards. The Ukrainians favor bulky camouflage fatigues with a big Red Army-style fur hat, which for some reason they color blue. The outfit looks very military, as though the border patrol has just parachuted in and taken the crossing by force from the enemy, and my mind spins trying imagine a landscape where green camoflauge and giant puffy blue hats makes the perfect disguise. The Poles favor a drab green military uniform with proper coat, slacks and cap, looking like they stepped out of a documentary about wartime Bletchley Park.

There are differences in bedside manner, too - the Ukrainian officer, a strapping blonde woman borrowed from someone's dominance fantasy, processes us with a tone of aggrieved indignation. Each irregularity in documents strikes her as a personal affront. To her eyes, the bus is sick with sin, from my venal lack of an immigration card (a document that has been given to every foreigner who has ever entered the Ukraine except me, she is expected to believe) to the unforgivable lack of notarized papers from the aunt trying to take her underage nephews home for the holidays. The scared woman is forced to leave the bus, her children in tow. The older one is twelve and gets interrogated at length by another guard. He looks white as a sheet. The younger child is around six, and bawls uncontrollably. Merry Christmas!

The Polish officer a hundred meters down the road prefers to affect an ironic skepticism, and I experience a brief and unusual swelling of love for my country as he smirks his way through the stack of passports, smiles, and leaves. The bus only has to wait a few minutes for us to get passed along to the customs hall. This is a smallish room containing a customs officer, a metal detector, an X-ray machine, and thousands of cigarettes. Some of the packs have been taped together with electrical tape into a kind of bandolier, suggesting they were found hidden around the waists or legs of smugglers.

Our bus is hit hard by the news. Very few of the passengers were aware of the new two-pack limit. The stash on the table grows rapidly as each person in turn surrenders a carton. To my shock, no one tries to sneak cigarettes from the large table of contraband, which sits completely unattended whenever the customs agent looks at his X-ray screen. I feel disoriented. Is this the same Poland I remember?

Once everyone has been scanned, we are released back into the bus, which can now start its long journey to Warsaw. The border crossing has taken us over four hours. Near Lublin the bus makes a short stop at a roadside diner, where the passengers are efficiently served a three-course hot meal in twenty minutes, and in another few hours we are passing over the Vistula, with the merry spire of the Palace of Culture and Science twinkling off to the north. Elapsed time: 12 hours. Average speed: 28 km/h

This has always been a rather passive-aggressive website, technologically speaking. You could read recent things, and you could read certain older things, but God help you if you wanted to poke around in the archives. The site was assembled by a script I wrote one night after two bottles of wine in 2002, and was afraid to ever look at again, let alone touch.

This past week I finally decided to do some long-overdue blog gardening, and now the site should be navigable back to its origins in the summer of 2002. It might even grow to have exciting features like a comments area, or actual new writing.

There are two joys that come with doing this kind of cleanup. The first is the discovery that, although writing regularly for seven years may not make you a good writer, it will certainly make you a less terrible writer than when you started. The second is the ability to go Orwell on the past.

As a form of moral penance, however, I have preserved the fact that my very first article on this site was about attending a Renaissance Faire.

Without droning on about the gears and levers that now drive this website, I would like to ask readers to email me if some link that used to work is now broken, or if something that works now would be better off being broken again.

The following are excerpts from an article by Juliusz Ćwieluch and Wawrzyniec Smoczyński [what a name!] that appeared on October 25, 2008 in the popular Polish newsweekly Polityka:

“I was told about the attack a few hours before it started. It was at night, I got a call from vice-president Cheney” recalls [former Polish President] Aleksander Kwaśniewski.

It takes less than three weeks for American and British troops to reach Baghdad without encountering strong resistance. But Iraq is a large country, and instead of crowds hungry for democracy and human rights, the soldiers find themselves greeted by irksome attacks attributed to Saddam loyalists. The White House adjusts the plan of action on the fly, and President Bush declares that democratization has to be preceded by stabilization. In order not to make it look like the Americans are occupying the country, Washington decides to hand over half the country to its closest allies: the British and the Poles.

In Poland, the idea of having our own sector elicits a mixture of incredulity and delight. We 'select' a calm region between Basra and Baghdad [...] But it will require two thousand soldiers, not two hundred, to control an area a quarter the size of Poland and the three million people scattered across it. The Polish government graciously agrees, but under one condition: the Americans are going to have to foot the bill. And so we find ourselves renting out the Polish flag, with the Polish mission imperceptibly changing from a volunteer one to a mercenary one.

With some1600 Polish entrepreneurs already picturing the treasures of the desert in their mind's eye, it becomes all the easier for us to assume the role of the occupier. The Lucznik company wants to equip the Iraqi Army with rifles, Stalexport wants to lay rail, Bumar would like to build a railroad from Kuwait to Iran, and Mostostal, Budimex, and Energobudowa each want to build roads, bridges, housing complexes and ports. And everything is supposed to be easy. After all, there were forty thousand Polish workers and twenty-five joint ventures in Iraq back in socialist days. We will serve as the eyes and ears for the deaf and blind American companies.

[Foreign Minister] Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz baldly states the aims of our Iraq policy. “We would like for Polish petrochemical firms to finally have direct access to raw materials” says the head of Polish diplomacy. [Polish state oil company] Orlen and the Gdansk Refinery set up a consortium, although their drilling experience lies mainly in the Baltic sea, and Middle Eastern petroleum can't be processed by Polish refineries. Are they worried about the competition? With the help of the Polish government the Iraqis are sure to reward our soldiers' hard labor with a few contracts. After all, deals struck outside of Poland don't have to be all that honest.

Poland, in charge of the Multinational Division, grows in stature as a military power. It doesn't hurt that the first country to join the Multinational Divison is one that the average Pole would have trouble finding on a map - Fiji. "They gave us troops, and we had to arm them, feed them, and pay them a very high salary" recalls then-Defense Department head Janusz Zemke. "It turns out their entire army spends its time on these kinds of missions, which relieves Fiji from having to support it. It also reduces the risks of military coup, which has a certain history over there."

Following their experience in Afghanistan, the Americans know that if they leave logistics to the Poles it will be a year before they see the first Polish troops arrive in Iraq. So without being asked, they agree to take on responsibility for transporting, feeding and lodging the troops. They are even very flexible when it comes to money. “I asked the people in Washington how we were supposed to finance reconstruction of the province, pay our network of agents and repurchase arms from civilians. What I got back was a practical question - would eight tons of twenty-dollar bills be enough? The pallets with the cash were enough to fill an entire Hercules, but I can't tell you what the full amount was” confesses Zemke.

...

The Polish Army embarrassed itself in even the smallest things. Seats in our troop transports were set up so that soldiers sat facing one another. This made it easier for them to chat, and for the enemy to shoot them in the back. Naturally, the bulletproof vests the troops were issued only protected their chest. When the search began for the responsible parties in Poland, it turned out that the Army had been ordering this seating layout for fifty years without anybody complaining.

The only excuse for the mission organizers was the fact that leading the multinational division was basically a fiction. Whenever it was supposed to go into action, it would turn out that each country had some kind of limits on the use of its forces. One group could only shoot when it was over 50km from its base, another was only allowed to fight in self-defense, some commanders invented pretexts for inaction on the spot. "The Hungarians sent a transport batallion without any vehicles. When we gave them the vehicles, they still found excuses not to complete the tasks assigned to them. We had to cut off their water to get them to give in," said one member of the Defense Department who requested anonymity.

...

Meanwhile back in Poland, neocolonial hubris was giving way to resentment of our ally. The largest bid to include a Polish firm ended in scandal and total disaster. In February 2004, the state-owned Bumar firm lost a bid for a contract to equip 27 batallions of the Iraqi army. The contract was instead won by a mysterious consortium called Nour USA, whose subcontractor was an even more obscure Polish company called Ostrowski Arms. What would later turn out to be a four-person company with its headquarters in a Warsaw basement was supposed to provide Iraq with arms for 20 thousand soldiers. And its owner was not even licensed to trade arms overseas.

The Nour contract ended up being voided, but Bumar lost the second round of bids as well. As a consolation prize it received some smaller contracts for helicopters, ambulances, cisterns and handguns. But the scandals didn't stop. Iraq ordered 24 post-Soviet Mi-17 helicopters that Bumar overhauled at a rush pace in Russia, using a company belonging to an ex-KGB member. After inspecting the first seven units, the Iraqi delegation refused to take delivery. In 2005, the new Iraqi government accused its predecessor of malfeasance in the area of defense procurement, and of purchasing useless scrap on a wide scale, including this purchase from Poland. Among the accused was the former Iraqi Vice-Minister of Defense, now a Polish citizen, Ziyad Cattan. The 28-year-old helicopters ended up, of course, being bought by the Polish Army.

On October 25 the last armed Polish soldier will leave Iraq, leaving only 20 trainers as part of a NATO force. The military agrees on one thing: Iraq has revealed the weakness of the Polish Army, paving the way for its reform. "Before Iraq the process of professionalizing the Army was off in the weeds" says Janusz Zemke. But we still have a way to go to be a professional Army. [...] Rumor has it that the new Chief of Staff may be Mieczyslaw Stachowiak, famous for losing 90% of his units in a single day during a NATO command exercise.

[...]

We have learned to look at the Iraq mission exclusively in terms of salary paid, contracts lost and Humvees received. There was no moral or political reflection over the intervention in Iraq five years ago, and there still isn't any now. The humbug about weapons of mass destruction, a hundred thousand civilians killed, the tortures in Abu Ghraib - all of that took place in some other war, one that Polish public opinion always opposed, at least in polls. Which, of course, did not prevent us from taking pride in our own valiant mercenaries, courageous colonists and good occupiers.