4.5 floors, 2:08

I finally screwed up my courage and, after walking home from work for the first time in months (it's witch's-tit cold outside, but I had my scarf, gloves, and trusty winter face mask), I lumbered into our building's B1-level staircase and started tramping up the stairs, activating my phone's stopwatch right as I took that first step. Per what I'd written on New Year's Day, I timed myself only until I had to stop, and I must say, the results were pretty damn shameful: I made it only four-and-a-half floors in two minutes and eight seconds.

In my defense, I'll note that I was a huffing, puffing mess before I started up the steps: my face mask was tight against my nose and mouth, making it difficult to breathe freely during my 30-minute walk from work to my apartment. I then started up the steps, mask now off, without having fully recovered from that exertion.

Whether or not you buy my defense, I now have a baseline upon which I can build, and as I embark upon this staircase workout, I can improve in at least two ways: number of floors climbed without stopping, and elapsed time per floor. Most of the walking I do is on horizontal ground; going vertically, up a stairwell, is a good way to get the heart beating and the legs burning. Without Daemosan as a fallback, this is the only way I can do any serious cardio.

A year or so from now, I want to move out of my current digs and into an apartment next to Namsan, back in the Dongguk University area. My friend Tom and I had been in that neighborhood once before, and we'd spoken with a very nice landlord who said a unit would be available for W10 million down and about W600,000 a month, plus utilities. While that's far more expensive than what I'm doing now, by 2017 I'll be in a financial position to absorb the increase in expense without overly straining my bank account. Once I move back to that neighborhood, I can start walking up Namsan routinely again. Wouldn't that be nice?


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