Sunday's walk

yesterday: resting under the Jamshil Bridge

Saturday betrayed me: on Friday, while at work, I checked the weather, and despite all the nasty precipitation, the forecast was all clear—Saturday would be cloudy, with no rain or snow. As it turned out, however, Saturday ended up bringing both rain and snow, with the rain keeping the snow from accumulating. The forecast for Sunday was all clear after the morning hours, so I chose to go for a walk around 3:45 p.m. out to the Jamshil Bridge and back—about 14 km, or close to 8.7 miles.

It had been a while since I'd done any real distance (except for a 10K walk done a couple weeks ago), and I was out of shape. Despite all the staircase work I'd been doing, the benefits of such work didn't port over to walking. Distance walking is its own thing, and walking isn't biking just as biking isn't swimming, etc. Different skills, different muscle groups, different everything. Suffice it to say that I was tired by the time I reached the Jamshil Bridge. I sat under the bridge for about 15 minutes, just drinking in the cathedral-like geometry of the structure, silently marveling at the effort and engineering that went into making it. (Korea went through a crisis period in the 90s, what with the collapses of the Seongsu Bridge and the Sampoong Department Store, not to mention the Daegu gas explosion and other examples of shoddy, corner-cutting construction. But the Jamshil Bridge seems to be one of the better bridges, having stoically withstood the test of time.) I farted around on my phone, allowing my body aches to fade a bit before I levered my big self up and headed back to my place.

The trip to the bridge was marked by an annoyance: an old man behind me who walked closely enough for me to hear his tread but at such a speed that he never passed me. I'm not a fan of being followed, even if the following is unintentional, as I'm sure this gentleman's action was. I shook him off eventually: he walked steadily, but he wasn't going the full 14K with me. He appeared behind me when I had barely exited my neighborhood, and he had disappeared before I'd even reached the Han River. The trip back to my place was marked by a different annoyance: a pain in my left hip joint, at the inner-thigh portion of the ball and socket. It wasn't crippling or anything, and as I usually do when pains arise, I simply soldiered on. It's remarkable how many pains disappear if you merely walk them off.

When I was approaching the Jamshil Bridge while walking along the Han, I briefly thought about stopping at a convenience store for snacks and refueling. I ultimately decided against it because (1) I knew that, if I ate or drank anything, I'd undoubtedly develop the urge to piss or take a dump while still en route; (2) the carbs would not be good for the stairs work I would be doing Monday morning (1.25 staircases); and (3) as I discovered, half the GS25 convenience stores along that segment of the Han had disappeared. That was startling: I'd come to think of those facilities as fixtures. I'd almost never visited them, but it was somehow comforting to know that I could stop at any time to refresh myself. Now, though, I saw that two of the four convenience stores were gone, and a humble fried-chicken joint (the bizarrely named BHC Chicken, which has always sounded like a chemical to me) had also bitten the dust. God only knows what will arise from the ashes of these now-defunct eateries and emporia. 

Oh, and I almost forgot: the huge, on-the-water Chinese restaurant, Dong Bang Myeong Ju, no longer had its Chinese sign up top. It looked to have finally gone under, as my buddy JW had predicted. To be clear, JW had made his prediction several years ago, and he thought the place would go under within a year, but his prediction came true about 3-4 years too late. According to him, the place was also known as one of those Chinese police stations, which may explain why the food there tasted... different. I didn't think the food was bad, but JW hated it the one time we ate there. I guess he was right about everything: the place's focus probably wasn't on the food. And he and I probably ended up as part of an underhanded Chinese data-gathering effort. I'm on file somewhere in Beijing.

A large LED sign along the Han said the temperature was around 6ºC—that awkward temp when you're not sure whether to wear a jacket or a coat. When I walked in such temperatures during my long walk last year, I also had my poncho with me, and my windbreaker plus the poncho worked as well as a coat to keep me fairly warm. I hadn't brought any gloves with me during this walk, so there were a few moments when I needed to shove my hands into my coat pockets (yes, I wore my coat) to keep my fingers warm, but all in all, the temperature was bearable. I had a hat with me, but I never used it.

By the time I got back to my place, I saw my time had been slow. Subtracting the 15 minutes of rest, I had taken 3 hours and 15 minutes to walk 14K. That's about 4.3 kph, slower than the human average of 5 to 5.5 kph. When I first timed this route, I had taken 3 hours exactly, so something must be going on. I'll see whether I can get my time back down to three hours as we head into spring. There will be many Jamshil Bridge walks in the near future.

This morning, I heaved my way up the apartment staircase 1.25 times, and I'm still contemplating which new exercise modality to add when March arrives. I don't think I'm ready for heavy clubs quite yet, so my choices are animal flow, dumbbells, resistance bands, kettlebells, and bodyweight calisthenics. A lot of what I want to focus on are core exercises to help my aching back; many backaches come from a weak core: every time the spine is startled into effortful movement, it spasms and overstrains. Core strengthening would help a lot with that, and all of the exercise modalities listed above can be used to help strengthen one's core.

As the weather warms up, the staircase work will become more difficult, which is why I need to do it in the early morning before the sun has a chance to create a greenhouse effect in the stairwell. But for a while at least, the distance walking will get easier as I shed my jacket and coat. Here's hoping that 2024 turns out to be an athletic year.