2024 walk route: Nakdong River Gukto Jongju
The dates of the walk haven't been determined yet (I have some dummy dates on the calendar right now), but I'll settle that over the next few months. The Nakdong River trail is, officially, 385 km long (i.e., it's short), but my personal walk will involve some diversions to motels since I won't be biking the whole thing at one go. This means I'll be walking a total of 403 km, but that might get revised up or down as I verify distances between stopping points. Average distance between stops seems to be 22.4 km—shorter than the 26K average on the full Four Rivers route from Incheon to Busan. I've pampered myself, too: there will be only 14 walking days, but I've planned for 20 days total, i.e., 6 extra days of rest for my over-30K days. One of those days, early on, will be brutal: 40K, so I'll be earning a bit of extra rest for that segment.
Basically, the route is stitched together from (1) the Four Rivers route I've walked many times and (2) the Sangju-to-Andong route that I walked in 2022. Expect a Kevin's Walk 8 blog to appear over the coming months. I'm also thinking of creating a Camino blog that will need its own clever title (a little help, Mike—this is more your walk, after all!).
The route I've crafted for myself this year won't involve any camping, so I won't need my big backpack. That's nice: I can wear my wide-brimmed hat without worrying about interference from the smaller pack. Will I take my meds along...? If I'm still forced by the hospital to do insulin, I'll definitely be leaving that at home: insulin needs to be refrigerated (yet another of its many inconveniences), and I can't guarantee cold storage on the path. Otherwise, I'll have my usual pharmacopeia, a combination of dietary/nutritional supplements and pills from the hospital. (Depending on my intestinal situation this coming fall, I might be forced to leave my hospital-prescribed pills at home and walk three weeks like a normal person. The horror!)
I figured out a way to weave the path together into something coherent at Sangju City, where my two previously broken segments* must meet. This involved cutting out a ridiculously short 12K segment, and merging that segment into the segments before and after it, making for two 30-some-kilometer days in a row. The longer of the two days will include an extra day of rest, so no worries. My feeties will survive. And if, by some miracle, I'm feeling hardy enough not to need an extra day of rest, I'll shorten my calendar at my discretion.
We've come a long way since 2008, when I knew jack shit about distance walking. My feet, at least, have been pounded into condition, and mentally, I can stand walking anything up to 60 kilometers a day (cf. any of my "crazy walks" from my place in Seoul to Yangpyeong). How my heart and lungs will perform this year, I have no clue, which is why I have to train. But I'm really looking forward to this year's walk, short though it may be. Ending it at the Andong Dam means ending on a high note. Andong is close enough to Seoul that, when I finish the walk, I might just go back to my apartment that very same day instead of staying in Andong overnight. But we'll see. That sort of choice can be made on the fly. Korea is a first-world country with great transportation, so I'm not too worried.
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*Busan to Sangju and Sangju to Andong.
All systems go. Still a very respectable distance. Looking forward to reading all about it. One med I definitely would bring along on the trail is nitroglycerin. Better to have and not need, than need and not have.
ReplyDeleteI have to figure out a way to protect the nitroglycerin from my body heat and from the ambient heat of summer.
ReplyDeleteTough one. Leave it in your (albeit smaller) backpack? Wouldn't worry too much either way. Biologics (GLP1 agonists like Ozempic,/Wegovy, and cancer immunotherapy drugs) need to be refrigerated, but regular small molecule pills can withstand temperatures of 40 plus Celsius without losing much of their efficacy.
ReplyDeleteWell, the obvious name for the Camino walk would be "El paseo de Kevin."
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to another vicarious long-distance hike.
Daniel,
ReplyDeleteI keep reading that nitro tabs are heat-sensitive, which makes me leery of carrying them around. But if my condition is that precarious, I may have to do just that. The Mayo Clinic site says:
Sublingual tablets should be kept in the original glass bottle. Screw the cap on tightly after each use and store the bottle at room temperature, away from heat, moisture, and direct light.
John,
It's more Mike's walk than mine: he's the one who proposed this trek, partly as a way to celebrate turning 60, and partly for his own personal reasons (he's Catholic). So maybe "El paseo de Mike y Kevin"...?
Definitely sounds like nitroglycerin (and other sublingual meds) is the exception to the rule. Best ask for an alternative from the doc before the walk. Hopefully, the meds will be an unnecessary precaution in any case.
ReplyDelete