the Bundang round-trip walk

I slept for a goodly part of today after I finished my mammoth walk early this morning. The walk occurred over the space of about ten hours, from 8:40 p.m. to 6:40 a.m., but I rested in three thirty-minutes shifts, so the actual duration of the walk was closer to 8.5 hours. That's an average walking speed of 4.12 km/h. Not ideal, but apparently close to normal: Naver Map, now new and improved, calculates walking time on the assumption that average people walk at a rate of around 4 km/h. Interesting: most hasty Koreans seem to walk at around 6 km/h.

So how'd the walk go? It went well, overall. There were some irritations—hot spots on my feet caused by minor friction inside my shoes. When I got back to my place, I fully expected to see incipient blistering, but there was nothing. My feet were achy even before I began the walk; at this point, I'd say the aches are diabetes-related and caused by overconsumption of sugar. I've experimented with my sugar levels, and less sugar does indeed seem to correlate with reduction of achiness. Like the guy who needs to have a heart attack to figure out he has to straighten out his life, I'm now finding that the fear of losing either or both of my feet to diabetes is motivating me to cut way back on sodas. I can't promise to banish sodas fully from my life, but I can make do with diet sodas and only occasional sugary sodas.

But I digress: the walk went well in terms of pain levels; I took ibuprofen at regular intervals, just as I did during the big walk last year, and this kept the pain from increasing. (I'd been worried about building a tolerance to ibuprofen.) I wore my newfangled hiking socks, and they performed well, as did the orthotic insoles I had pulled from my old size 12s to put inside my size 13s. There's still some friction on the tops of my toes, as well as on the right side of my right pinky toe, but the pain was bearable. As I've gotten into the habit of telling people: I'll keep walking as long as I can stand up and put one foot in front of the other. So the overall "quality of life" during the walk was satisfactory, and I think I've learned that my body can still take this sort of punishment for the month that I'll need to go from Incheon to Busan.

Walking at night is something I've done before—twice when doing the "crazy" sixty-kilometer walk from my place to Yangpyeong. Such walks tend to be quiet, and depending on my route, there are either few to no people or a surprising number of people. On nighttime walks past Hanam to Yangpyeong, the path has generally been empty or sparsely populated; last night, however, the road to Bundang and back had a lot of people on it, and there were only a few scattered moments during which no one was in sight. I was surprised (and if I'm honest, sometimes a bit resentful) to see that many dedicated bikers and walkers out on the path. But who could blame them? Last night was cool—cool enough that the 85% humidity didn't affect the pleasantness of the walk. Some bikers trundled by with their obnoxiously bright headlights on; one dude blasted by on what appeared to be motorized rollerblades; he was wearing powerful lamps on his head, his chest, and even on his knees. Music blasted from speakers strapped to his person, and he was easily the most bombastic thing I saw on the trail all night. Along with bikers and walkers and that one rollerblader, there were people on electric scooters. Another dude was on a uni-wheel scooter that apparently had a super-powerful motor; the guy was bookin'. So I didn't lack for company last night as I lumbered slowly along with my trekking pole. Some fellow walkers, walking briskly, passed me as they marched to whatever their destination was. Some of the older ladies did typically Korean things like clap loudly or sing while walking; one woman repeatedly threw her hands up in the air and behind her head, looking for all the world as if she were summoning tentacled, chthonian creatures from the depths of the earth. Fellow walkers and bikers spanned the spectrum from young to old; when I used to night-hike up Namsan at 3 in the morning, back when I taught at Dongguk University, my fellow walkers were almost always older folks.

The Bundang route is basically a straight shot south, following the Tan Creek, which turns into something like an unnaturally straight canal as it approaches Seongnam City, where the Bundang district is. Much of the path is well-lit by street lamps, but the long stretch that runs a few kilometers next to the air-force base across the creek is lit only by faint green lights set into the middle of the bike path, and weird electric lights at ground level at the path's creekside edge. Those lights tended to turn on and off, doing a little peek-a-boo as I walked past them. Because the nighttime temperature was so cool (in the high 60s Fahrenheit, or 18-20 degrees Celsius), there were almost no insects buzzing around those lights.

I was tired by the time I reached Jeongja Station in Bundang, my halfway point. I did a U-turn and began heading back to my place. The return leg felt a lot longer, I have to say, but at the same time, I was glad to be testing myself this way: this walk was a sort of shakedown cruise for the big walk to come. I took two nighttime photos as I began my walk. Around 5 a.m., toward the end of my trek, the sky began to lighten, and I was finally able to take some more photos. Here they are, for your delectation:

In the above pic and in the one below, I finally answer a question that had been bothering me for a long time: around Christmastime, the tree in these two photos (which is near my apartment building) is covered in electric lights. I had long wondered whether those lights were on the tree all year long. As you see, the official answer is no.

I took the above tree shots barely five minutes after starting my walk, i.e., around 8:45 p.m. Saturday night. Below is a photo taken much later, about three or four kilometers away from my apartment. You see the moon, along with a bright star that is actually Venus, also called the Morning Star (which is a name sometimes applied to Satan):

After 6 a.m., it was bright enough to take pics of some flowers along the final stretch of the walk:

And finally, a shot of that final stretch:

My feet ache, but I can control the pain with my ibuprofen. Strangely, my right foot wasn't swollen before I crawled stinkily into bed this morning, but as of this evening, it's back to being a bit swollen. With the walk totaling over 55,000 steps, I think it's safe to say that whatever stress fracture I suffered this past February has healed strongly. I had no bone-related issues last night. Verdict: all in all, I think my body is ready for the upcoming hike. There will be blisters in my future, but no worse than before. I'll continue to limit my sugar intake in the hopes of losing more weight before my launch date (Saturday, September 26), although I don't expect to lose much. I now have less than two weeks before I'm on the trail; there's still some prep to be done, but there's no need to rush quite yet.

So there you go: all the hiking news that's fit to print.