A poor idea, in the long run

I'm never doing that again.

Last spring, I found out that this year's Chuncheon Marathon would be on my birthday, Sunday, October 26, and decided on the spot that I had to run it. My first marathon, four years ago, was in Chuncheon, and another run there would nicely bookend the three Joongang Marathons (here in Seoul) I'd run since.

The Joongang course is very boring, but Chuncheon's is beautiful, albeit hilly. It winds around and across a lovely river shaped like a Rorshach blot, overlooked by lovely little mountains covered with fall foliage. I did my first marathon there in 2010, walking one of every four minutes, in five hours, 40 minutes. My three Joongangs, running the whole way of a flat course, were clustered right around five hours even, and I figured I could handle Chuncheon's hills in 5:15 or so.

The long runs in training went badly; the muscles above and below my left knee stiffened up after eight miles or so each time, and without my erstwhile training partners Lauren, Val, and Laura-Claire (who had all left the country), I didn't have the will to push through it for another six or eight or ten miles to complete the runs. I did, however, complete a test 20-miler three weeks before the marathon, so I talked myself into believing I'd be fine on the day. ("Take no prisoners!"- George Armstrong Custer)

I'd rejoined the Seoul Flyers running club mostly to be able to ride their bus out to Chuncheon, a couple of hours east of Seoul. My only worry was finding a cab at 4:30 a.m. to take me across the city to the bus, but one came along within a minute of my hitting the street. Riding 65 miles an hour on the darkened city streets was just about enough to wake me up.

When the Flyers set up camp at Chuncheon, the leader announced that everyone should be back on the bus at 3; if I finished in my self-predicted time, I'd make it by 2:40, despite starting the the last group, almost a half hour after the tiny, fast East Africans. (Seriously, guys, they have the size, build, and speed of whippets.)

It was a beautiful day for a run, and the first miles went off fine. But the hills got to me, the knee stiffened up right on schedule, and I had to walk most of the last half of the course. This caused a lot of anxiety, as I kept thinking "If I run the rest of the way, starting now, I'll be back before everyone is on the bus and wanting to get home" while just not having the energy. All the way, minute by minute, I saw fifty exhausted runners on the bus, wondering "Where the hell is that guy?"

It just went on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on (squared). I had planned to carry my cellphone so I could take photos, but it made my shorts sag (what with the iPod and half-dozen energy gels in my pockets), so I'd left it behind and missed the "Where are you?" and "Call me!" texts from the Flyers' president at the finish line.

As I finally, finally, got near the end, people by the side of the road were applauding, which only made me feel worse; I imagine they were rooting for the plucky old man running his first marathon, but it was my fifth, and it was slooooooow and pathetic.

Then I was finally done, in six hours and seven minutes (cue sad-sack trombone) and I limped as fast as I could to get my (completely undeserved) medal and pick up my bag o' crap, and then halfway through the damn town, burdened as I was, to the most humiliating moment of all, boarding the bus and being applauded--sincerely, I think, but it felt sarcastic--by the impatient busful of runners.

I did my best to ooze into my seat and disappear.

The Flyers' tradition is to take the bus over to a traditional Korean restaurant after the marathon; Chuncheon is famous for its dakgalbi--spicy chicken ribs. When we got there, I went in, but the difficulty of finding a seat, the sheer impossibility of my standing up again after a horrible marathon and a half hour sitting cross-legged on the floor, and the fact that I'm a vegetarian and chicken ribs are not technically a vegetable made me decide to wait alone in the bus instead.

At least the street was empty, so I could change out of my soggy running gear on the bus. This was the first birthday I've ever had where being naked, alone,  on a tour bus was the highlight of the day.

The trip to Chuncheon had taken two hours; the trip back took five, thanks largely to some bozo who delayed the bus until the traffic was utterly clogged. Add another two hours to hobble up the stairs to my second-floor apartment... it was a long day.

I am registering today for a 10K run in April, then I'll probably do a half-marathon, but a full marathon is much, much longer than twice a half-marathon. My ego is finally past needing to say "I'm a marathoner" or feeling old because I don't do the full course anymore. I could; I don't want to.

I promised myself in 1970 I'd do a marathon one day; I've done five. But...

I'm never doing that again.

Sixty is the new fifty-eight

Hwangap, the sixtieth birthday, is a big deal in Korea. Here, as in other East Asian countries, there's a tradition that a new life cycle starts every 60 years, so hwangap marks the start of one's second life, with the opportunity to start over and do better. (Also, it used to be quite an accomplishment to reach 60.)

My hwangap came on Saturday. If we count from Friday afternoon to Saturday afternoon, I had a great day. (Saturday evening involved sitting in front of my laptop, eating cheesesticks and drinking hard cider, alone. Don't you judge me.)

We had a day off from classes at school on Friday so the teachers could greet the parents and justify why their little angels weren't all getting straight A's. (The questions are always about the grades, never about the learning.) That wasn't so very much fun, but at the end, I got a "Happy Birthday" song, a delicious cake, a handmade card, and a pointy yellow hat. So that was way cool.

Friday evening, a bunch of us from work hit the noraebang, the private karaoke room. The two requirements for noraebang are to sing loudly and to smuggle in beer. We fulfilled both admirably. Noraebang is the most fun I can have with my clothes on, and I loved it, as always, especially seeing some of my work friends really cut loose. The highlight was my friend Dave and I singing the K-pop hit Ugly: "I think I'm ugly, and nobody wants to love me/Just like her, I wanna be pretty, I wanna be pretty..." It has a ring to it, especially in our deep, manly-man voices.

Saturday morning, my actual hwangap, brought my birthday hash. I'd been announcing it at the end of every hash for months, and I was happy to get a big turnout. (It was also the World Peace Through Beer Hash, which didn't hurt.) It was a beautiful, sunny fall morning, and a couple of guys and I laid a really interesting trail near home... (have you ever slid on your butt down a 30-foot slope covered in AstroTurf?) 

Afterward, there were many kind words and two red-velvet cakes; nobody brought candles, so I blew out the toothpicks. Three of my friends from work, all women, attended their first (and maybe last) hash; they all said they had a good time and it was nice to have them there. I handed out the patches my buddy Oranguspray executed from my design:

(You read the "Don't you judge me" up above, right?)

Then some of us went to the foreigner ghetto, Haebangchon, for pizza, beer, and merriment.

To top it off, I walked over to Itaewon and stopped in to see Minha, the woman who makes the patches for the hash. (Her mother, in between selling souvenirs such as kimonos and keychains, sews them onto our happi coats.) They told me they had a present for me and presented me with a gorgeous, and gorgeously tacky, baseball-style jacket:

It's very comfy, but I won't be wearing it in public; ornate as the design is, it looks like the kind of thing a 19-year-old GI would take home to his girlfriend. Next to the kimonos, it's probably the most expensive item Minha's mother has in her shop. Minha made sure that her mom brought out a midnight-blue jacket, knowing that it's my favorite color. I was very touched by their generosity; I'm just a customer, after all, and they weren't doing it to drum up business, just being extraordinarily nice; there's no place else I could go to get the patches made. I'll remember their kindness for a long time.

Then... home. Nap. Cheesesticks and cider.

So, anyway, guys, I've been thinking about this whole "aging" thing...

First, of course, 60 isn't what it used to be; people live so much longer, and I expect to be respiring for a long time yet. My family is long-lived, and I've never smoked, I don't eat meat, I drink just the right amount for longevity, and I run. 

Also, emotionally and mentally I've just turned 25 for the thirty-sixth time; it used to be that people got all proper and respectable when they became adults, but we Boomers--call it refusing to get old or failing to grow up--decided not to change; we still do all the things we loved when we were younger, just less often and more slowly. (I hope that my knee doesn't stiffen up halfway through my marathon this Sunday... yes, I'm a marvel of athleticism and courage. Sometimes I amaze myself. [/sarcasm] )

I really do feel 25, except for when I get out of bed in the morning. Maybe I should stop doing that...

A hazy shade of winter

...okay, it's not really winter. It's only the morning of October 31, and soon, back home, the kiddies will be going house-to-house, filling their bags with Reese's Pieces and some odd radioactive stuff rather hopelessly euphemistically called Circus Peanuts. (Do kids still go door to door? Seems like all you ever hear about anymore is "safe" trickrtreatin' in malls, "harvest festivals" at churches, and twenty-somethings [preferably female] swigging tequila in Naughty Nurse outfits. Ironically, the whole "harvest festival" thing that fundie churches go for is totally utterly completely ultimately pagan in origin, and their "Satanic" Hallowe'en-- yeah, I spelled it the way I was taught to spell it in 1960-- is, being the eve of All Saints' Day, in that sense Christian.)

But I digress.

It feels like winter. It's uncharacteristically warm today, 62 degrees at 9:30 in the morning as it preps for heavy rain most of the day, but the little trees just outside my apartment have, overnight, shed all their lovely red leaves. They think it's January. The air, which remarkably has been quite clean since I've been here, in the last week has been filled with fog or smog or something ending in "og". (Frog? Gog? Magog? Egg nog? ) It's windy and gray a lot of the time. And the locals, who by my standards tend to bundle up way too much, are bundled up way too much. I just came back from my morning run and a young Korean guy was out running in a baseball jacket. Buttoned to the neck.

My birthday (my eighth, exactly, in dog years) came and went on Monday and I felt pretty flat. I got lots of birthday wishes on Facebook and a couple of e-cards (thank you all!) and some of my friends at school went out with me for dinner, but it didn't feel very birthdayesque. The big days-- birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas-- are the hardest days to be on the other side of the marble; we're teaching on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, but even if we weren't, it's tough.

On my birthday, the dinner was over early, as they tend to be when you eat at 4:30. I took the bus to Yangjae and walked to Kyobo Books in Gangnam. Walking back, elbowing my way through thousands of Koreans shopping, going out to dinner, or trudging home after a day's work at LG or Hyundai, I felt so alien, so totally out of place, with nobody who looked like me or sounded like me-- hardly anyone my age, for that matter-- in a way I've only felt once before in fourteen months in-country. 

Thursday was more birthdayish for me; Vanessa, one of our other teachers, had her birthday, and her boyfriend sent over a wonderful cake, which she shared. And my Bestie sent a very nice present (for me, not for Vanessa), She (Bestie, not Vanessa) also sent a very thoughtful email saying that I look so much better in photos here than I did in pictures taken in the States, that Korea has obviously been good for me.

And it has; I'm doing pretty darn well. But there are times when early winter comes from inside. I weigh an astounding 199, the most I ever have, and don't seem to get up the energy to do anything much. And a niggling thought keeps sneaking in (or out): my dad had his first stroke when he was seven years older than I am, I have a couple of congenitally narrowed blood vessels in my brain (I guess I'm narrowminded after all), I have rather high blood pressure, and I don't want to one day be alone in my apartment in Korea and stroke out, having somebody find me a day later.

I know that's asking for trouble and certainly self-pitying, especially when I have people I care about with real and serious health problems. Sorry.

So... this post has been a lot of SJC, and not in an attractive light, and not much ROK. Read it fast; I might just decide to delete it. But I feel better for having written it.

And I'll post later about the good stuff at school.

... I look like a monkey, and I smell like one, too.

Ninety percent of my birthday on Sunday was really frustrating, mostly due to me. But I confirmed something important... I just don't get really down anymore. For many reasons, I guess, my downs are better than most of my ups used to be. And the day turned out well, anyway, so hurray for me.

Heeduk's away for three weeks doing mandatory military service, and he asked me to cover one Sunday morning class for him each week. So I did. On the walk back, I stopped at E-Mart for a few groceries, wandered into the CD department, and found a two-disk compilation for 7000 Won. (These days, that's about five bucks.) The labeling was all in Korean, except for the song list: Desperado by the Eagles, Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton, Yesterday by the Beatles... thirty songs in all, half of them favorites of mine. So Happy B to me! Visions of a loaded iPod dancing in my head (wait... that's from a Christmas poem...), I hurried home with my find, stuck it in the computer... these are not the original artists; they're imitators.

I got a birthday call from the New World and talked to my best friend for awhile.

I knew I was supposed to meet Ray at 6 p.m. for dinner, but I couldn't quite remember what the rendezvous point was. I tried to call him, but he was out for the day with his church activities. I had a vague memory that he'd said to meet him by the Beomeo subway station, but that didn't make sense... must have been from earlier in the week, when we'd planned a walk to a lake... must be at the dorm... I think... maybe... yeah, that's the ticket.

I'm not embarrassed that I couldn't remember where to meet him; I'm the spaciness champ, a regular ADDeity. But I am embarrassed that I know that and hadn't written down the location, or remembered to double-check with him on Saturday.

Armed with a pretty good map, I headed out, via 20-minute walk, long subway ride, and 15-minute walk uphill, to find the entrance to Apsan Park, at the base of one of the mountains on the southern edge of the city. I wanted to check out the Korean War museum and then take a nice mountain hike. Got there; no entrance, no signs, no hint, nothing but a green mountain completely blocking the view to the south. Walked along the sidewalk two hundred yards to the west: library, no park. Went back four hundred yards to the east: enormous stone staircase, like the Lincoln Memorial's, but longer and steeper; at the top, a surreally vacant plaza with an oddly shaped memorial tower of some kind, with no entrance, no signs, no pictures, no park entrance.

We now return you to complete sentences, already in progress.

I walked back down to the subway station, took the train downtown, lost 1000 Won in a coin locker setup that turned out to be indeciperable, walked to Kyobo Books, and sat down at their Starbucks for awhile for 3000 Won's worth of bitter coffee. Then I headed over to the dorm, went up to the third floor to Ray's apartment (6:00), but it was just me and my shadow. I jogged a block to the nearest subway stop and took the train to Beomeo (6:15), just in case he was there, but there wasn't even a shadow. Took the subway back to the dorm (6:30), in case he'd just been late getting home: nope.

So I walked a half-mile, took the bus home, and Skyped him the moment I walked in the door (7:00). He picked up right away; we were supposed to meet in front of the DongA department store, and he'd waited till 6:30. Fortunately, Ray is easygoing and forgiving, so I was at the apartment for five minutes and headed back out to the bus and reversed the route.

We wandered around the neon-lit, thronged downtown and ended up at Pizza Hut, which is pretty pricey here: 17,000 Won for a smallish garlic pizza that was so thin it only had one side. Had a good time, though, and a glass of sangria helped. Then we walked over to the incredible waffle place with the incredible waffles and had one o' them big hot incredible waffles with scoops of vanilla and green tea ice cream, chocolate sauce, banana, kiwi, melon, grapes, and a tomato wedge. Wow.

We hung out awhile longer, Ray bought some winter boots, and I came home.

I got another call from my friend, which ended the day very nicely. Mostly I didn't want to be alone all day, and I wasn't. So it all worked out, but maybe most important of all, when I dragged my exhausted carcass up my stairs, after everything had gone wrong and I'd missed Ray and would spend the evening in the apartment... I was okay with that. And that was my best present of all.

(And the next morning I got the world's funniest e-card from my grandboys in California, where it was still my birthday.)

I can't survive 55

(Above: at the entrance to my apartment: Tigger, Florida shell that was my mom's, Samwise Whale.)

Today's my fifty-fifth birthday, and I do expect to get through this year and many more. But you know me: always go for the cheap pun and the pop-culture reference. It by some chance the title of this post is a self-fulfilling prophecy, we'll all have a good laugh.

Actually, I might be 54 or almost 57... it's not my birthday for another 32 minutes in the time zone of my birth, and the Koreans count you as one year old when you're born and everybody officially ages a year on January 1, so... ah well, age is just a number. (Sometimes a really high number.)

I confess to being a little blue around the edges this week. I think I've settled in, and it's getting rather routine. Sometimes I feel about as I often have, as we all do sometimes: "Oh crap, I gotta go to work today." On the other hand, my face is healing up pretty nicely and I finally got into the twenty-first century when I found a cute little iPod Shuffle for 30 bucks. I'm listening to "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" from NPR a lot. Also, the World Series is on, although having the commentary in Korean is disconcerting. Besides that, there must be some glitch in the satellite, as the Mets' uniforms look oddly like the Phillies'.

I have schoolwork to catch up on and a little later I may go for a mountain hike at Apsan Park on the edge of the city; it's a gorgeous fall day, sunny, breezy, not quite 70 degrees. Fahrenheit, that is. My friend Ray asked me to dinner at 6 tonight, so that will be nice. I'm thinking pancakes, or possibly octopus. It's a tough choice.