QUADRUPLE SUMMIT, BABY!

I'm desperate to bring my November walk average back up, so on Sunday I decided to take matters into my own tentacles: I did my usual double-summiting... twice. I also decided I wanted to hit 40K steps, but because I started walking at 7PM, I knew I wouldn't be able to rack everything up before midnight. 40K is more than a quadruple summit: it's a quadruple summit plus a walk from my neighborhood to Jongno and back.

Hitting Namsan's modest peak four times was tiring but glorious, and because I hadn't eaten all day, I was pretty sure that I had lost a significant amount of weight. When I got back to my place and weighed myself, I was astonished: I clocked in at 114.7 kilograms (253 pounds)! That's the lowest I've been in years, and that weight actually puts me at or slightly below my best Sookmyung-era weight of 255 pounds.

The walk took me past midnight and into Monday morning. Here are my stats, according to my pedometer:

Sunday: 29,701 steps, 14.4 miles, 2250 calories burned.
Monday: 10,616 steps, 5.0 miles, 697 calories burned.

Combined: 40,317 steps, 19.4 miles, 2947 calories burned.

So I burned almost a day's worth of food (253 pounds of body weight times 12 calories per pound equals 3,036 calories per day to maintain weight) by walking around 20 miles. And since my pedometer shortchanges me when it comes to distance, I can multiply 19.4 miles by 1.2 and get 23.28 miles, which is probably closer to the actual distance I walked. So I almost walked a marathon.

My left hip joint started bothering me toward the end of the walk; I'm going to have to go easy on that because I don't want a return of the hip-joint pain. Walking myself into a crippled state would feel like a bitter irony.

To end November with an average of 15,000 steps per day, I'll probably need to mix double-summiting with single-summiting for the rest of the month. Easier said than done: there are, to be honest, days when I'd rather not walk at all. Walking, as much as I love doing it, takes a lot of time, and now that there's a chance I might have a social life (uh, more on this later, maybe), I might have to start switching over to more intense, less time-consumptive exercises. It might no longer be about the steps: instead, it might be about the gasping and the subsequent hours-long metabolic boost that comes from paroxysms of extreme effort.

What I find most delightful about tonight's ultra-megawalk, though, isn't the four times I reached the top of Namsan, nor is it the 3,000 calories burned or the 23 miles walked or the over 40K steps: it's the weight loss. 114.7 kilograms is my lowest low point yet, and it means I've broken through the 119-kilo barrier and fallen through several more floors to a whole new level. I hate to say it, but a combination of starvation and walking seems to be the royal road to weight loss. (As I mentioned above, I hadn't eaten all Sunday.) Although it's not a habit I want to get into, there are undeniable benefits to fasting for a whole day.

No time to sit on my laurels, though: I need to do a double summit Monday night. I'm out of the 12K doldrums and back in the 13K range, but I need to up the average to 15K by the end of November, and I have less than half a month in which to do it.


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