Walk Thoughts #10: biked 30 miles; felt like 60

I've seen dedicated bikers on YouTube who easily cover 140 km (87 miles) in a day. My hat is off to them. I haven't biked in about ten years, and today, I think I biked more in one session than I've ever biked before. Despite all that, my distance apparently wasn't all that impressive: according to Google Maps's distance-measuring ruler, I barely biked 30 miles, total, in about 4 hours. I took a lot of breaks, hence the slow pace—but the breaks weren't because I was winded: they were to alleviate the screaming pain in my ass that came from that long-forgotten demon: saddle sores. In fact, there's a lot about biking that I had forgotten, including Murphy's Law of Cycling: the wind will always be against you.

My damn phone ran out of battery power right as I reached my U-turn point, thirty minutes short of Paldang Dam, so I wasn't able to blog my position. Then, hilariously, when I was two-thirds of the way back to my place, my battery power miraculously measured 19%, so I could take a selfie... but I still couldn't blog my position. That's another thing I'll need to take care of: getting a couple new phone batteries plus a portable charger. My current battery is the one that came with the phone back in 2013, so it's old and needs constant charging.

I unwisely wore a coat today; it was probably in the 50s (10-13º C), so I was sweating and dripping snot out of my nose as I groaned along. I hadn't brought anything with me in terms of toiletries—no saline solution for dusty, irritating contacts; no tissue for a runny nose; no bottles of water to sip from—nothing—so I felt kind of guilty when I brought the bike back to the rental place, knowing that those handlebars were now coated in loads of my DNA and bodily flora thanks to my constant face-wiping. You're welcome, guys.

The bike rental is a story in itself. I had seen an expat site that listed a bunch of bike-rental spots, but none seemed close to where I lived, and the website itself seemed a bit old and out of date. So I walked up the street to the bike guy I had spoken with a few weeks ago and asked him where I might rent a bike. He pointed me back down the street to a bike shop that I had passed many times when walking home from Jamshil, but to which I had paid little heed up to now. "Tell them I sent you, and they'll give you a discount" my bike dude said. I thanked him and left, then walked up the street to the other bike shop, whose name turned out to be GoGo. Rental for an hour was something like 6,000 won; 3 hours was around W15,000, and a 24-hour rental was W30,000. I knew I'd be needing the bike for more than three hours, so I steeled myself to pay the full thirty thousand.

A little over four hours later, I brought the bike back, my hair all windblown and frozen in place thanks to dried sweat. The guy who took my bike back—the same guy who greeted me when I came in to rent a bike—did indeed give me a W5,000 discount since I hadn't gone anywhere near twenty-four hours. When I thanked him and left the shop, he ran out after me and told me I could rent for several days at a much steeper discount. In return, I asked him if it would be all right for me to come back and talk about what to expect on those bike paths, given my upcoming cross-country walk. He said that would be fine.

So my saddle sores are killing me right now; the crotch-bones are screaming, and I'm dead tired. Biking at my current weight is more of a chore than a pleasure; gravity's downward vector is, like the wind, always against me. Even a slight rise is enough to kill all forward momentum and force me to pump desperately just to move ahead at a crawl. Depending on what stretch I was on, my estimated speed varied from a measly 6-9 miles per hour to perhaps 15 miles per hour on an easy downhill. I found myself grumbling at the ground's unevenness, given that the path was always close to the river: ideally, a river-bank path ought to be as flat as the river water itself. But no.

I have a selfie that I'll slap up soon, but I'm too tired even to think about tonight's exercises—which in theory ought to include jump rope as cardio. I think I may have done enough cardio for one day. I'm beat. Still, it's embarrassing that this was only 30 miles; it felt like 60.