time to think about this year's walk

the 385K Nakdong River National Trail (English added)

This year's walk is going to be substantially shorter than any of the big distance walks I've done up to now. I'll be doing the Nakdong-gang Gukto Jongju, i.e., the Nakdong River trail which, as far as I can tell, is only 385 km, or about 60% of the length of the Four Rivers path (633 km). Technically, I've already done the entire length of this trail, just never together in one go. In 2022, when I did the Jeju/Andong walk, the final four days of that walk went from Sangju to Andong, following the Nakdong River along an eastward spur. And every time I do the Four Rivers trail from Incheon to Busan, I pass by Sangju and head down to Busan, so I've done the Sangju-Busan segment many times. 

The Nakdong-gang Gukto Jongju goes from Andong to Busan via Sangju (or from Busan to Andong, if you will, which is likely the route I'll be doing), so it's just a matter of stitching together the segments I've done to form one coherent path. Sangju itself is the awkward part: when I started in Sangju in 2022, it was a very different part of the city than what I normally go through on the Four Rivers trail, so I'll need to see what changes I have to make for this year's path to make sense. The most commonsense approach will be simply to follow the river, which means I'll need to figure out what lodging is available along the way. I also need to create the next blog in my series: Kevin's Walk 8.

I'm pretty sure I won't be camping along this route: there ought to be a motel at every stopping point. That means I can use a much smaller backpack, and I can wear my wide-brimmed Korean Grim Reaper hat again since there'll be no large backpack to block it. That ought to make this a very nice walk indeed, however brief it might be.

And how brief will it be? If we go by simple arithmetic, the Four Rivers walk takes me about 29 days total—23 days' walking and 6 days' resting scattered over the calendar. 60% of 29 days is 17.4 days, which I'll round up to 18 since any fraction of a day ought to count as a day unto itself. That's about two-and-a-half weeks, then. Can I do this walk in 14 days plus 4 rest days? We'll see! In theory, I ought to be quite a bit lighter by the time I start walking, so I might not need that many rest days. A lot depends on how many of my walking days are 35K or above in length. That's usually what determines whether I'll be staying somewhere an extra day.

Anyway, with summer here, it's time to get planning for the fall. I also need to do some serious distance walking right now as practice: I still haven't done a big walk of any sort since leaving the hospital—nothing over 14K. Gotta work on that.