The final countdown

So here I am, a little less than twelve hours before I have to leave the apartment and head to Chuncheon for the five-to-six-hour Moment of Truth. (I'm counting on my friends' advice that at 5 a.m., even in my neighborhood, I'll be able to find a taxi to take me to the Seoul Flyers' bus. I'd hate to train for six months and not be able to get out to the race.)

I'm pretty much as ready as I'm likely to be; I've trained well (albeit for a few weeks short of the full term due to switching races), I've got my stuff stacked by the door (wonder which indispensable item I'll forget), and there's not much left to do but fret.

This will come as a huge shock to you-- if you've never met me-- but I'm a worrier and, some less charitable souls would say, a whiner. There are several things to be concerned with:

-The ideal marathon weather is 50 degrees and cloudy; the forecast is for 72 degrees and sunny. Ordinarily that's what I would call a perfect Indian summer day, but there are no Indians in this country and my running a full marathon deserves a lot of adjectives, but "ordinary" isn't one of them. (Of course, a day later it's supposed to be in the 50s.)

-The Chuncheon course is very hilly, albeit (running as it does entirely around a long lake) beautiful...

 

Last year's Chuncheon... note the gorgeous scenery. I'll be noting the enormous hill.

-I'm used to having lots of water on a long run-- dehydration is a bad, bad thing in running-- and all they have is a water stop once every five kilometers (three-plus miles). (Did I mention it's going to be warm?) On the brighter side, the dearth of water may be a blessing in disguise, as there aren't any toilets on the course.

-There will be about 21,000 runners; I'll be starting somewhere around 20,900th; I hope the other Seoul Flyers don't get sick of waiting for me at the finish.

Still, I had a massage a few days ago so I'm a little less sore than I have been and my iPod and watch are fully charged. I hope I am.

I have a self-imposed code: I will never wear a shirt from a race I don't actually finish. I have the official Chuncheon Marathon fleece and two Flyers/Chuncheon long-sleeve t's and I'll be hornswoggled if I have to throw them out. 

I can't let myself not finish.

My six-word memoir

Came to Korea to orient myself.

A sunlightful weekend

One of my students, in his effort to write vivid English, accidentally created the word sunlightful.It's a beautiful word, no less so for its absence from any and all dictionaries. I like it. A lot. I'm using it from now on.

And it has indeed been a sunlightful weekend, with crisp fall weather and an abundance of sunshine. I've used my time.


I started the weekend as grumpy as Lewis Black in Hell. But, like the guy in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who got turned into a newt, "I got better."

It started when I got a glorious Butterfinger Pancakes brunch date canceled out from under me on Saturday morning. My friends, if Heaven has a Denny's, it's Butterfinger Pancakes in Gangnam.  :: sigh ::

I moped about the apartment awhile, spectral pancakes dancing syruptitiously about my head, and finally decided I needed to go somewhere. My somewheres tend to be the same few places: Gangnam, the COEX Mall and Itaewon for books, E-Mart and Costco for everything else. This time I was hoping for a little exercise and something different; I've been dying for a good hike but haven't wanted to interfere with my marathon training (or, for that matter, turn an ankle or fall off a mountain or anything before the big race.) (Afterward would be fine.)

I poked around online and found a listing for Umyeonsan ("Sleeping Cow Mountain"), just one subway stop from our nearest station, Yangjae. So I went there.

This city is full of surprises... just a few minutes' walk from the Nambu Bus Terminal, I started up a steep dirt trail on Umyeonsan. Trails separate, rejoin, and wind around all over the mountain, with few signs, even in Korean. I had a vague idea of heading to Daesongsa, the mountain's Buddhist temple, but no idea how to get there. So I just headed up and up, the noise of the massive city all around receding and the sound of magpies and breeze growing stronger, winding around amidst the pine trees.

After a half hour or so, I came upon a signpost that said "Daesongsa" in hangeul. (Being able to read the writing, even though I don't usually know what the words mean, has proven time and again to be invaluable.)

Daesongsa is the smallest temple I've been to, a single building for worship, surrounded by a fountain, a one-story office suite, and a gift shop: a tiny outbuilding, with bracelets, incense, books, and tapes, that operates, unstaffed, on the honor system.

Click on the above photo twice-- not a double-click-- for a detailed closeup.

 (This is not me.)

 (Nor is this Tug.)

For a Saturday, there were remarkably few people around, on the mountain or on the temple grounds, which added to the serenity I get hiking in the woods and at Buddhist sites. After strolling around for a bit, I looked upward at the lovely Umyeonsan woods with their endless (steep) trails, thought about the badly-needed peace I might find there, thought about the (steep) trails... and headed down the paved road to the city below.

And that was my next surprise... like some cartoon of a shipwrecked man on a supposedly deserted shore who one day discovers a Club Med on the other side of the island, after a short downhill walk I found myself on the grounds of the Seoul Arts Center, with its opera and symphony halls, art museum, and plaza with coffee shops, restaurants, and dancing fountains. It was like stepping forward a thousand years in five minutes. This, for example...

...is a pedestrian bridge just down the block from the Arts Center; it's just a tad more modern than the temple grounds so close by.

---

Today is one week to the marathon (my five-plus-hour moment of truth), and the Seoul Flyers held their monthly social get-together on the Yongsan Army base, the US military's premier outpost in Korea. I'd never been on an army base before; Yongsan is huge, determinedly American, and mostly rundown (some of the buildings were erected by the Imperial Japanese occupiers 90 years ago.)

Our host Jim led ten or so of us on a "history hash", running around the steep roads and stairs of the base and stopping while he explained its buildings and its history. Our army has put every last building, even the stockade (the tiny prison building the Japanese put up, still with iron bars on the windows) to use and some of the soldiers live in little quonset huts.

The rest of the afternoon brought me:

-veggie dogs (my contribution)
-Frisbee
-Boca Burgers (my first in two-plus years!)
-the race kit for Chuncheon-- booklet, timing chip, race bib (I'm Joseph Burchmeier now, as I could only enter the race by buying the number of a Flyer who had to withdraw), and a Chuncheon fleece jacket, which sadly is lavender in color but is otherwise lovely
-beer
-my official Seoul Flyers running shirt
-deviled eggs
-apple crumble
-cherry pie
-nice people
-new friends
-an invitation from my brand-new good friend Shawn to join the Southside Hashers running group, which conducts running-and-beer sessions on my side of the river every weekend.

If you know anything about me, you know that very few things in life are worth more to me than new friends... fortunately, free shirts and pie are among those few things.

(Mostly joking here. Mostly.)

So... one week to Chuncheon, confident and a tad nervous... and it's been a very sunlightful weekend indeed.

(Did I mention the pie?)

...but words can never hurt me

...yeah, right.

The recent news about bullied gay teens killing themselves reminded me of a recent incident on Facebook.

A month or two ago, a girl I taught six or eight years ago in St. Augustine posted an angry status update about a guy who cut her off in traffic. She called him a "faggot". She didn't mean she could tell he was gay; it was just a term of scorn, the same way teens say something's "gay" when they mean it's weak or stupid.

I posted in response that I wished she'd picked a different word. A Friend of hers (unknown to me) responded that I should lighten up, that it's only a word and words don't matter.

Well, I've spent the last twelve years of my work life telling people that words do matter. The language of Shakespeare and Mark Twain and Tug McGraw ("Ninety percent of my salary I'll spend on Irish whiskey and women; the rest, I'll probably waste") matters.

Don't tell the families of the dead kids that words can never hurt them.

Here in Korea, men have a completely different outlook from American men when it comes to expressing affection and to masculinity. Boys in school pat each other's hair and sit with their arms around each other. I saw a ballplayer sitting on his teammate's lap in the dugout. (Highly unlikely with, say, Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter.) Heck, men wear pink shirts. (To use a common expression among the kids, "OMG!") Some of the boys wear earrings and, I think, a little makeup and spend longer in front of the mirror than I do at an all-you-can- eat brunch bar.

But gayness per se (that is not pronounced "Percy") is an utter taboo. Some older people believe that it didn't exist here till Americans brought it over. I know some gay expats, mostly women, but the gay Koreans keep themselves pretty well hidden (though I hear there are a few gay bars in Seoul for people who know where to look). In a culturally and ethnically monolithic society, being different in any way is frowned on. This particular challenge to tradition is several steps beyond.

For myself, frankly, it took a while to move from snickering about "homos" when I was a kid to realizing that sexual preferences have nothing to do with morality, that everyone deserves happiness, and that it's none of my damn business who you want to sleep with.

What's in our hearts is more important than who's in our beds.

The undiscovered country

Today is October 12, which used to be Columbus Day when I was in high school. (Columbus landed on Hispaniola when I was in elementary school.) But perhaps the less said, the better about how he didn't find the Mysterious East, he wasn't the first European in the place he did find, and what he did to the people there. Let's just say I'm glad the Big Ten school I attended wasn't in a city named after him. (The city was named after two women and a bunch of trees. I like women and trees.)

At any rate, I myself found the Mysterious East two years ago. And, like Columbus, I have an undiscovered country of my own. In my case, the undiscovered country is me... my nerve, my guts, my determination. And I'll be setting foot in this country in twelve days. (Assuming I can get to the Seoul Flyers' charter bus by 6 a.m., before the buses and subways run and before cabs are cruising the neighborhood.)

I'm pretty confident about the marathon, even though I cut the training short by a few weeks. I think I can finish in 5:20 to 5:30; I guess I'll find out soon enough. My lower back's been killing me lately (and yesterday I missed my first day in fourteen months at St. Paul) but that doesn't seem to hurt, or be hurt by, my running.

Reading these brief paragraphs, they seem rather melodramatic, but in the words of Doc Brown in Back to the Future, "Then I figured, what the hell." So I'll let them stand. It does occur to me that, though you'd never know it from the Star Trek movie by this title, according to Hamlet, the undiscovered country is :: ulp :: death.

But I think I'm gonna be fine.

Twenty-six-plus

My longest training runs hadn't been going to plan; I could only do 17 miles when I was supposed to do 20 and 20 when I was supposed to do 23. So it was with some trepidation that I set out on a planned 26-mile run/walk (three minutes running, one walking) on at 6:30 a.m. Sunday. But immediately I felt as if this time I was going to make it; the heat and humidity were way down and I felt strong.

I made my way back and forth and forth and back again along the Yangjae Cheon path between home and Gwacheon City, four miles to the southwest. I spent some time navigating the track at the Gwacheon soccer stadium, watching the local club teams play; I saw the Blue forward and the Yellow goalie crunch together in a (possibly rib-cracking, definitely game-ending) collision.

I was about 16 miles into the challenge when my good friend Chris called; he'd promised to come out on his bike and keep me company. He'd actually told me he'd ride with me the whole way, but as nearly six hours of biking at 13 minutes per mile isn't exactly a fun way to spend Sunday, I'd told him I only needed a boost near the end of the run.

And so Chris came out, bless him, on his bike and rode along, encouraging me from Gwacheon almost to the Han River in central Seoul and back again to our neighborhood...

And. I. Did. It. I made it the whole marathon distance, 26 miles on my GPS watch in 5 hours, 50 minutes 51 seconds, plus an extra quarter-to-half mile through tunnels and under bridges, where the GPS freezes up.

It was the greatest athletic triumph of my life, at least since I made a home run in kickball (all the way to Mrs. Bell's classroom, you guys!) in :: koff :: 1959. I guess I'm allowed one athletic triumph every fifty years or so. I guess I should have been ecstatic when I finished, but I was so exhausted that a quiet glow of satisfaction was all I could muster. And I still feel it; it's outlasted the soreness.

...and the real marathon approaches, step by step, inch by inch... still moving faster than I do, however.

I can't believe it's not Buddha

After our monstrous rain on the first day of autumn, the weather miraculously stayed beautiful for the rest of our Chuseok vacation week. It was sunny and crisp, just the kind of gorgeousness we've learned to relish but not expect. Fall truly is beautiful here (although the leaves don't get spectacular), and all the more so because it's all too brief.

On Thursday, I discovered the correct bus number to go from our neighborhood to the COEX Mall. (The city government has a website that allegedly tells you how to get from anywhere to anywhere by bus, but it works about as frequently as Kim Jong Il hosts a pie-eating contest.) My destination was Bandi and Luni's Bookstore, my purpose to get the third book in Steig Larsson's oddly compelling The Girl Who... mystery series.

I still had the excellent Seoul map we used on our school photo scavenger hunt and I was amazed to see that Bongeunsa, a Buddhist temple, was right across the street from the COEX Mall/Seoul World Trade Center, which I had visited often. It had been so long since my happy trips to Donghwasa, on the outskirts of Daegu, that I just had to visit Bongeunsa.


The first amazing thing about Bongeunsa is simply that there is a serene, bucolic temple compound right in the middle of one of the most upscale shopping areas in this huge, materialism-mad city. Down the street, you find Jaguar and Porsche dealers, ritzy department stores, the city's poshest hotels, and off in the distance, the huge Olympic Stadium. It's hard to imagine a less likely place for renouncing material goods.

The second amazing thing is that, as I entered the temple, the middle-aged Korean woman at the information desk noticed my "Ithaca is Gorges" t-shirt and asked if I was from Ithaca. I was startled, but (suave devil that I am) recovered and cleverly said, "Yes, I am." She said, "My son is at Cornell!" It's a small weird, after all.

She also told me about the temple's outreach program, in which foreign visitors take part in a tea ceremony, talk with a monk, and meditate. It sounds interesting and it only takes two hours... unfortunately, they hold it every Wednesday and I was there on Thursday; my next Wednesday off isn't until after Christmas. As usual, my timing was peccable.

Although Bongeunsa can't match Donghwasa's grandeur (as the latter is set among the birdsong and little waterfalls of the mountains), the Seoul temple grounds have their own charms. There's a tremendous sense of serenity on the property, with only the traffic noise outside the walls disturbing the crunch of gravel underfoot and the aura of peace that comes from so many hundreds of years of meditation.

I've written in passing before of my affinity for the philosophy of Buddhism: detachment, a peaceful mind, acceptance, living in the moment, and (above all) compassion. I fail at these goals often, but at least I know what I would like to be.

The trappings of the actual religion (the inevitable golden statues and incense, the bowing to a man who instructed his disciples not to worship him, the often-grotesque art, the extremely unlikely cosmology) repel me as much as the philosophy appeals to me. I think that ritual-- of any kind-- just turns me off.

 

...Tug likes this painting, though.

So I guess I'll never be a capital-B Buddhist, but the Dalai Lama and, especially, the wonderful Thich Nhat Hanh speak to me in a way that probably no other spiritual leaders do. And I love that Buddhism instructs us to renounce our egos and accept our place in the universe, rather than to place ourselves at its center.

Hey, look at me! Look at me! I'm renouncing my ego!

After my visit, I crossed the street to the dazzling neon-LED-jewelry-fashion-go-go-go underground world that is the COEX Mall and got my Larsson book (as well as a book called Buddha or Bust). I went placidly among the noise and haste and remembered what peace there may be in silence.