if the gods be good

Assuming we do have Friday off, I'm thinking I might actually start my walk in the very, very, very early morning—say, around 2 a.m. It'll be dark and cold, but that's fine: while I'm in Seoul proper, illumination won't be an issue, and since I'll be walking along the riverside trail, there's no chance of getting lost. I'm also going to walk three laps around the local park, right when I start out, so as to front-load an extra three kilometers to the walk, thereby taking my total for the day over 60 km. That's going to put me at around 37.2 miles—the farthest I've ever walked, period. I'm expecting some crazy step total that surpasses 70,000.

But let's step back a bit and view this supposedly grandiose achievement from another angle. Imagine being an infantryman with a 100-pound rucksack and a 20-pound weapon, marching 25 miles through mountainous terrain in a single day. Kinda puts my own walk in perspective, doesn't it? What I'll be doing is easy-peasy by comparison to what soldiers routinely do.

Still, the walk will be a difficult one for me. Tonight, I did a modest training walk of 26,951 steps, and partway through the walk, a twinge of hip pain that I had felt Tuesday morning suddenly intensified while I was on the Han River path. Not good. I've been through weird, mysterious, obnoxious hip pain before, back when I lived in Hayang, and I'm hoping like hell that this isn't the left-hip version of that right-hip pain from years back. If things get worse over the course of the week, I may have to cancel the walk this weekend. On the bright side, I'll have what I pray will be a nice three-day break with nothing to do. We'll see.