I'm always curious, when I come back from these walks, to see how my health has (or hasn't) improved. So before going to work today, I swung by the doctor's office, having not been there since February—back when the pandemic was in its early stages, and we were all paranoid about what to do and how to act (which is why I avoided the doc's office). As with previous walks, my numbers turned out to be a mixture of the delightful and the disappointing—mostly the latter. My blood pressure turned out to be on the high side, as did my HbA1c (a very high 9.4%). This is probably because I had taken most of my meds early in the year, then spent several months not taking anything, then started taking the last of my pills again during the final week or so of my walk. Belatedly restarting my medicine wasn't a recipe for medical-stats success, as it turned out. No shit, right?
On the bright side, my short-term glucose reading was 115, which is the lowest ever recorded for me. I take this to mean that the HbA1c, which is a result showing a three-month average of your blood sugar, indicates that I was doing badly before my walk, while the short-term glucose reading shows that I'm currently on the path to having low blood sugar (keeping in mind that the short-term reading can fluctuate hourly throughout the day). But compared to May 10, 2016—when my short-term was 285—I'd say a 115 reading is pretty damn good. The other good news is that, after some trepidation, I stepped on my bathroom scale and discovered that I now weigh 116 kg. You may recall that my pre-walk weight was 128.5 kg, so I'm ecstatic to discover I've lost 12.5 kilos (27.6 lbs.): that's the most weight I've ever lost on one of these walk projects. Of course, it's all for nothing if I do nothing to keep the weight off. We'll see how that goes.
So as I said, it's a mixed bag this time around. The doc has put me on the same regimen of meds as before, but he wants to see me again in a month to see whether my BP has gone down after consuming the prescription daily. So I'll be back in the doc's office on November 28... which is only two days after Thanksgiving, right when I'll be stuffing myself like the turkey I am. Shit.
Let's talk about speed first. I left Yangsan's Bliss Hotel at 4:40 a.m. and arrived at my final destination at 12:50 p.m., a total travel time of almost exactly eight hours. During that time, I rested twice, for a total of an hour. So if you were to calculate my average rate of speed, rest stops and all, you'd get a rate of about 3.6 kph. If, however, you were to subtract the rest periods, my speed while walking would be 4.1 kph, which is, like last year, probably the fastest I've walked this entire journey (last year, I walked at nearly my full speed of 5 kph). Chalk it up to feeling energized and ready to tackle the final leg of the journey; I'm pretty sure the reasons for my relative celerity are more psychological than physical.
Next, let me treat you to what you've all been waiting for: pics of my feet! Yes, I can actually smell your nipples stiffening in anticipation, so let's get right into it with pics of my right foot's top, side, and bottom:
The most damaged-looking thing is probably my right pinky toe, which did swell up with a painless (and initially unnoticed) blister early in the walk. The blister went away on its own, apparently bursting and draining while I was walking. Aside from that, the toe's damaged appearance is a result of what happened last year, when I unwisely wrapped the digit in Leukotape and kept it that way for most of a month. My right pinky toenail hasn't been the same ever since. The rest of my right foot is generally fine, partly thanks to the Leukotape that I (correctly!) applied to blister-prone parts of my right sole. I'll be talking more about Leukotape in my big-ass epilogue post.
Let's move on to the left foot:
Here's where most of the damage occurred. Note the bruising happening under the nail of the big toe and the toe next to it. The most annoying blister appeared on the pad of the foot just "behind" the third and fourth toes (counting forward from the big toe). While not as bad as the huge blood blisters I've had in the past, this one was annoying. The dark spot on the side of my heel is all that remains of the blister caused by those painful Costco orthotics that my boss had gifted me with. To be clear, I don't blame my boss; neither of us knew how good or bad the insoles would be. Lastly, you see the stubbornly inflated remains of the gigantic blister that had formed on the side of my left foot, right at the base of the big toe, where people often get corns.
All in all, this is surprisingly little foot damage compared to that of previous walks. And mainly thanks to the heavy meds I picked up while staying at the obnoxiously run Havana Motel, I can't say that I suffered to quite the extent I had last year and in 2017. I remember what it felt like to finish a day of walking and to limp around in extreme pain like a cripple. Luckily, that didn't happen this time, and that's partially thanks to the ibuprofen.
I have to confess that I paid pretty dearly for yesterday's celebratory dinner at Gino's. While I don't think I ended up losing all that much weight over the course of the past month, I do think my stomach (the organ, specifically, not the whole abdominal area) shrank, and yesterday, it resisted the sudden avalanche of pizza that I forced into it. The whole rest of the evening (and this morning, too, truth be told), I was on and off the toilet in my otherwise-comfortable motel room.
Interestingly, a Western dude biked up to Gino's while I was seated at my halfway-outdoors table. It became obvious that he spoke Korean very fluently. I was sneering at his accent at first, but within a few minutes of listening to him talk to the wait staff and to unknown interlocutors on his phone, I realized the guy's skill level was way above mine. A little bit of humble pie to go along with the pizza.
The walk itself was pleasant and perfect. You couldn't have asked for better weather. Early on, Naver Map once again led me to a nonexistent bridge when I wanted to cross the Nakdong, so I untangled the problem by choosing the same alternate path I'd found last year. This took me only slightly out of my way, so it wasn't a big deal. As darkness turned to dawn, I found myself already at the outskirts of Busan, and then it was just a matter of walking almost straight south while counting down the kilometers. The final leg of the journey had distinct phases to it; I especially enjoyed the 6- or 7-kilometer portion that's tree-lined. It's a simple and beautiful bit of path, and its only problem is that it's flanked by noisy roadways: a freeway on one side and a highway on the other. By the time the milestones were telling me that I had only 5 km to go, the comforting, tree-lined path had given way to the route's last phase, in which you march south with little to no shade and watch as the Nakdong River Estuary Barrage grows larger as you approach it.
I had elected not to take a long rest break to charge my cell phone, and the phone's battery power dropped below 5% when I reached the one-kilometer mark. That was both amusing and frustrating. There was a park with a large, impressive shwimteo in it by the east side of the barrage (you cross from east to west to reach your goal), so I stopped there and allowed my phone to charge up to 12% so I'd be able to document my very last kilometer on the trail.
I walked the last thousand meters with a mixture of wistfulness and eager anticipation: it was an awesome feeling to succeed once again, but I also knew this would be my last trek on the Four Rivers path for a long while, for there are other paths to explore, and I'm not getting any younger. My arrival at the endpoint was utterly without fanfare. I took a few pics and selfies at the arrival site, then elected to take a long nap, while again recharging my phone, in the shadow of a cultural center. I was, of course, interrupted: a pair of workers drove up in a van and began loudly hammering and drilling not ten feet from where I was trying to sleep. By that point, my phone had over 50% charge, so I slowly gathered my things and left the endpoint. The walk was officially over.
Consistent with what I'd done at the end of previous walks, I walked out of the endpoint area, crossed the street, and hailed a cab. When one arrived, I told the cabbie to take me to Busan Station, and he did so, driving me the same route taken by past cabbies. What I saw out the window was a mixture of old and new buildings and districts; I noted how the signage for subway stations looked different from what you see in Seoul. Soon enough, we arrived at Busan Station.
I went straight into the station to get my KTX train ticket. As I got closer to the ticket windows, an introverted impulse made me glance to the side, where the ticket machines were. Suddenly not wanting to interact with a ticket agent, I went over to a machine that had an English-language "Domestic Cards Only" sign on it. The machine proved easy to use in Korean, and the one term I didn't understand wasn't hard to look up. Now armed with a ticket for the next day, I walked out with the intention of hitting the Busaninn Motel for my overnight stay. As you saw, Dear Reader, the motel was temporarily closed because of the virus, so I went next door to the Plaza Tour Motel (광장관광 모텔) and ended up with a decent room. Check-in was done painlessly with the assistance of the calmest front-desk clerk on the whole peninsula. I went up to my room, took a victory dump, relaxed a bit, then went out and caught another cab out to the Haeundae Beach part of town, where I stuffed myself with Gino's pizza and garlic knots. Overall, I thought the garlic knots were better than the pizza itself, which wasn't up to the standards of Gino's in Itaewon. The pizza wasn't bad, but I expect better from Gino's.
After dinner, I wandered over to the beach, touching the waves and taking in the magnificent view of both the ocean and Busan's impressive skyline. As nice as Gwangalli is, I can see why people flock to Haeundae. I'll talk more about my impression of Busan in my epilogue post. That cross-town cab ride was educational, as was my time at Haeundae Beach. Suffice it to say that Busan is worth exploring further.
I went back to my motel a bit after sunset and was too tired to write a lengthy blog post (which I'm now doing on the KTX). I spent much of the evening contending with gastric issues caused by my prandial overindulgence. Other than that, it was a quiet night, and all that remained was to wake up around 7:30 and be out the door by 8:15. It was a short walk across the street to the station, and when Train 120 appeared on the departures marquee, I went to Platform 8, boarded the train when it showed up, and here we are.
My face is tanned or burned enough that I now have to wear my bandanna: without it, my forehead is ghostly white, and I look ridiculous. It's going to be an awkward few weeks once I'm back at the office starting tomorrow: I don't plan to keep wearing my bandanna to work. As for my beard... I normally shave it all off once I'm back because it's infuriatingly itchy, but I'm considering keeping it and growing it out further, which makes me no different from millions of men who are bearding up during the pandemic.
Expect a few more posts before I finish blogging at this address. There's plenty more to say, and I need to slap up the rest of the photo essays. In the meantime, here are some images from the final day of the walk to distract you. It's sad that I won't be coming this way again for a while, but at least I'll have all these memories, both in my head and in the form of these images.
UPDATE: surprise! I've uploaded all my pics to Google Drive, so I'm posting the full photo essay below. Enjoy.
