Saturday, July 03, 2021

a good 26K walk

Rain, rain, rain.

It's the start of the monsoon season, and while today's walk started rain-free (I began at noon), somewhere between 1 and 2 p.m., it began raining in earnest. I had my poncho, but a poncho can do only so much, and I still ended up soaked in lots of places.

JW made the mistake of wearing cotton socks, which are the absolute worst socks you can wear for distance walking, but he now knows to buy synthetic fabrics like nylon, polyester, or Gore-Tex. JW wasn't done preaching at me about eating habits, and he didn't seem too impressed about my weight loss thus far, so once again, that's confirmation that I still have a long way to go.

Breakfast was my usual SlimFast shake; lunch was a bunch of nuts (macadamia and cashew), some dried blueberries, and a strip of beef jerky. Kind of meager, but it added up to somewhere over 600 calories. I made up a bag for JW as well; he appreciated the gesture.

The last two or three kilometers of the walk to downtown Hanam are along a packed-earth path; almost no one was on the path thanks to the rain and wind, so for the most part, it was only us crazies. I didn't mind; walking in the rain is fine when the weather is comparatively warm. A cold fall rain, by contrast, is demoralizing. 

As we walked, sometimes I led, and sometimes JW led. JW and I would occasionally talk, and JW, having been a church-choir member back when there were church services, liked humming loudly to himself. I was fine just taking in the scenery. This is a walk I've done many times before (sorry for no photos, but you know, rain), so it was quite familiar to me. Today was mainly about seeing whether I could hack 26 km, and I did.

We were tired when we reached Hanam's Starfield Department Store and waited for the 9303 bus to arrive. We got on the bus, soaked (JW had bought himself an umbrella, but he ended up partially soaked, too), and I promptly fell asleep for much of the ride back to Seoul's Jamshil Station. JW and I parted ways when the bus reached Jamshil, and I took the subway the rest of the way back to my place. In all, a good, if rain-soaked, walk.



No comments: