Sunday: test walk #2 done!

As I said earlier, yesterday's walk was about 32,000 steps. Today's walk came in at about 42,000 steps, but I did have to cheat a bit to get that number: I did my U-turn today after 21,000 steps, but somehow, despite walking the same route back, and despite being tired and having a shorter stride length (which should have meant more steps in total), I realized, when I was close to my apartment, that I was going to have a step total of only 41,000. So I did an extra loop around a local park to bulk the step count up. Here are my numbers.

Yesterday:

Today:

Ignore the mileage count on my pedometer's readout: it's always exaggerated. Yesterday's walk was almost exactly 18 kilometers. Today's walk was probably in the high 20s, but not quite 30 km.

I don't have much in the way of images today. Here's a selfie:

Here's a pic of a conspicuously camouflaged building next to another structure by the wall surrounding that mysterious place—which I referred to yesterday as a prison or a military base or something.

Turns out it's a Korean Air Force base; I'll get into how I know that in a bit, but I can say that the camo colors—which I somehow missed yesterday—were a huge hint. And just for shits and giggles, here are two screen shots of Naver Map on my cell phone. The huge, blank, unlabeled area is the military base:

In this screen shot, I've zoomed out a bit so you can see the entire blank area where the base is:

After blogging so much about restrooms in my previous post, I was amused that I had missed this huge sign promising yet more restrooms (click to enlarge):

And finally, here's a shot of what it's like to come back from the Seongnam City area. Because I took the subway back home yesterday, I didn't know what the view looked like when you're facing north on the path. Now I know that the Jamshil Lotte World Tower, fifth-tallest building in the world for the moment, is visible all the way from Seongnam (click to enlarge):

So that's it for the images I have this time. Let's move on to an assessment of my second day of encumbered walking.

As predicted, I learned a lot. The good news is that I was able to go from 32K steps to 42K steps after only a single day's rest. This means the walk is a go: even without NSAID pain relievers like ibuprofen, I'll be able to do each day's walk without the pain ever becoming debilitating. (I'm getting ibuprofen all the same, though!) I'll be achy, like last time, but the pain isn't crippling or otherwise debilitating. Every night in a motel will be like hitting the reset button. Sort of.

The other good news is that my Gregory performed excellently once I put the towel around my neck. I might also have fastened the chest strap a little more loosely today because, truth be told, I didn't feel the strap trying to abrade my neck through the towel. I've found that, when I cinch my hip belt very tightly and then pop the chest strap off, this actually relieves pressure on my shoulders: the backpack sags a bit backward, which makes its weight press more directly onto the hip belt instead of pulling down at my shoulders. True, I have to cinch the belt pretty damn tightly to accomplish this, but the effect is worth it. Even a little pressure on my shoulders causes my back to ache right around the lower thoracic vertebrae—a spot that's often vulnerable for us fatties who carry our fat everywhere, not just in our bellies and love handles.

Another good thing I discovered about my new backpack is that it rides evenly. As much as I loved my Gregory Whitney 95, the pack that died not long after the 2017 walk, I hated how it never seemed to settle directly onto my back. I would check the pack by holding up my cell phone and looking at my reflection in the phone's unlit front panel, and very often, I'd see the Whitney listing to one side or the other. This caused me (1) to get very annoyed, which is already problematic when you're on the trail; and (2) to try solving the problem by tugging uselessly at various straps. Adjusting my straps never worked, or it worked only temporarily before the listing returned. With my new Gregory Baltoro 85, the pack seems—at least for now—perfectly balanced. And because it's a Gregory, everything feels familiar, so I can throw the pack onto my back the same way I did with the older Whitney 95.

The chest strap is, thus far, performing well. I'm super-paranoid about it, though, because it's attached to the shoulder strap via the same flawed plastic mechanism that my Whitney used. I've got my spare strap just in case there's an equipment failure, and for the moment, I'm betting the chest strap will fail at some point during the walk, if for no other reason than that the cosmos often seems to be against me. If the chest strap doesn't fail, I promise to have a little celebration of that fact once the walk is over.

There were some new pains today. One annoying pain came from my left big toe, which felt as if it were being squished or even bruised by my shoe. But whenever I wiggled the toe, I could feel that the shoe provided plenty of wiggle room, so I'm guessing the toe was reacting more to my socks (I wore two pairs) than to my shoe. Another pain seemed close to my right kidney, but I eventually figured out that that was just another bit of back pain, not anything kidney-related.

Distance walking entails all sorts of little and big pains, some of which go away when you don't think about them, some of which might require some degree of attention, either by slightly changing how you walk or by doing something more drastic that will require stopping, sitting down, and checking/adjusting this or that. I've been lucky, over the course of thousands of kilometers of walking, never to have had the type of pain that just stops me in my tracks. I've had charley horses while lying in bed, and those have been excruciating, but never anything dire like that while walking. Thank Cthulhu.

I'm amused to see that I walked, today, only 4/3 of the distance I'd walked yesterday, but my calorie consumption, as interpreted by my cell phone, seems to have doubled from around 3000 to around 6000. I think I can ignore that stat the same way that I ignore the mileage stat... unless I somehow walked much faster today than I did yesterday.

One last interesting thing about today's walk: a middle-aged Korean lady ended up walking next to me for about an hour. She told me she had lived in England and Malaysia; she had studied some English while abroad, but now, it's her kids who speak much better English than she does. Upshot: we spoke exclusively in Korean, which was good practice for me, given how flabby my language skills have become of late. (I speak almost no Korean in the office these days: most of the in-office Korean-language interactions happen between my team leader and our department's higher-ups. I'm actually glad I don't have to deal with any of that crap, but it does mean that my already-puny language skills have atrophied over the past year.)

Our conversation ranged widely; the lady asked me questions about what I'd consider a fulfilling life, and she told me about her own situation and that of some of her friends and relatives, some of whom feel trapped and in a rut. Part of this was prompted by my mention of my upcoming walk to Busan—something that not everyone can do. (In that sense, I ought to be thankful to my bosses for allowing me to embark on a month-long trek like this.) I talked a bit about the frustration of office work, which involves little more than clickety-clicking on my keyboard for eight hours a day. We talked very superficially about religion and concluded that "be nice to each other" was probably an ethic found in most of the major religious traditions. I asked the lady about what was behind that mysterious wall, guessing that it was an army base. She told me it was actually an air-force base, which meant that it could get noisy in that area whenever the aircraft were doing their thing. (Mystery solved!)

Most interestingly, the lady confessed that she had been thinking about doing a longish walk from her house out to a friend's house in Yongin. I wasn't clear on the details, but it sounds as if the friend's house is around 10 km away. To me, that's absurdly easy to walk, but for this lady, the thought of a 20-kilometer round trip was almost paralyzing, and she confessed to not having the confidence to walk such a distance. Somehow, though, by the time she and I parted ways, she said she had regained some confidence and now had the desire to try the walk. I didn't have time to give her any sage advice about building her feet up so she'd be in good condition to do 20 kilometers, but she seemed like a smart person who could figure that sort of thing out for herself.

Walking and talking kept me from thinking about the pain. I may have to think seriously about having a walk partner on future distance walks, but that's something of a cynical, selfish reason to bring someone along, i.e., it wouldn't be for companionship so much as for the medicinal value of the companionship! In other words, a walk partner would be a tool for me to use. And as any standup comedian will tell you, it's never good to feel like a tool. Maybe it's better just to stick with the introverted-loner thing.

It could also be that walking and talking got me walking faster than I would have walked had I been alone. That could account for the disparity in step count: 21,000 steps out toward Bundang, then a U-turn, then only 20,000 steps back to my place because I had walked and talked with someone for an hour. Maybe my stride length wasn't as short, on the return trip, as I'd thought.

The lady and I never exchanged names or contact information. She had said that she liked talking with foreigners whenever she saw them on the trail, which was only rarely. She asked me whether having someone suddenly talk to you out of the blue was bothersome; I honestly told her that I wasn't bothered. This may be because she had a pleasant way about her. I didn't find her cute or anything; she was just a regular Hausfrau with a kind demeanor. We wished each other well when she split off to head back to street level.

The walk to and from my U-turn point was rather crowded: everyone was out today. By "everyone," I mean mostly old people in various types of clothing; the bikers—even the grandfathers—were all Spandexed up and wearing aerodynamic sunglasses. The old ladies, with their bizarre toy-breed dogs, were wearing their usual garish, tacky, I-don't-give-a-fuck-anymore attire; among them were the women I call Darth Ajumma because they wear those gigantic visors that they slide over their faces like welding masks. Families were out on the walking path, and long pelotons of bikers streamed by at random intervals. My large backpack makes a statement: people could see I was On A Mission, so some of them would nod in greeting when I nodded at them. Most folks, though, just ignored me, except for one older gentleman who saw my "WALK RIGHT!" tee shirt and had a good chuckle. I could tell he understood my motivation for wearing the tee: too many Koreans ignore the rules of the road, weaving any which way. I had talked about this problem with the lady as well.

So, to sum up: this was a good, educational walk that taught me a lot about the mysteries and wonders of the Tan Creek route, what sorts of pain I'll encounter on the path down to Busan and whether I can manage it, how my backpack and shoes are going to perform, whether I can walk days in a row without collapsing into a puddle of man-tears, and whether a single night of rest is enough to prep me for the next day's punishment. Because I've been watching a ton of YouTube videos about hiking and distance walking, I'm beginning to realize, though, that most pro hikers have, as one of their goals, pain-free hiking. For many of them, this comes down to the brutal truth of weight loss, an absolute necessity since weight figures so prominently in any walker/hiker's trip planning. Lose kilos off your body and off your pack; refine your gear as you learn to buy smarter. One dude hiked the 2600-some-mile PCT (Pacific Crest Trail) with a pack that averaged under 12 pounds, not counting water and food. I'm still at 11.5 kg base weight; somehow, I have to cut that in half. This will mean buying a synth-down quilt instead of a sleeping bag, and figuring out which lighter alternative fabrics will work better for me. This second walk down to Busan will be, I hope, a refined version of the previous 2017 walk, but even after this walk is done, I know I have much more to learn. The road goes ever on and on.