the elephant in the room

Koreans are normally the type to ask the undiplomatic, asshole-ish questions, and living in Korea as I do, I get these sorts of questions a lot, even from expats who've lived in Korea too long and now act just like Koreans, so before any of these sterling examples of human character have a chance to sound off about what assholes they are, let's get these questions about my health out of the way right at the beginning, shall we?

1. How did you let your health get to this point?

It's a complicated issue with a complicated answer. Bad dietary choices and bad dietary habits are a large part of the equation, but so are bad genetics. I have friends who are as fat if not fatter, and they report (or at least claim to have) no blood-pressure problems, no diabetes, no heart problems, and no incidences of stroke. They often have dietary/health habits are that way unhealthier than mine, including a rather robust consumption of alcohol (I don't drink or smoke). I know genetics is a factor because my father had a heart attack in his early 60s, and it followed the same pattern as mine, resulting in a stent, strict dietary recommendations, and all the rest. And my dad isn't even fat. So to the people who are quick to blame only my dietary habits: think again.

2. How can you still be fat after all you've been through?

The simplest answer is: because I don't starve myself. I'm also no longer in a position where I can exercise until I wear myself out, which is what I think a lot of the "body transformation" guys are doing on YouTube, à la "The Biggest Loser." Believe me, I'd love to just lose all of this extra weight—poof. But I was cursed with a slow metabolism, and I'm wired to get fat at the drop of a hat. When I had my stroke in 2021, a UK friend suggested the Newcastle Diet, which I did for the recommended ten weeks. It's an effective diet for quick weight loss: I dropped 60 pounds (about 27 kg) in three months, and my HbA1c went from close to 10 (yikes) to 5.7 (practically non-diabetic). But unless you've got a will of absolute iron, the diet is unsustainable beyond ten weeks. It's basically 800 calories a day, with a diet shake in the mornings and evenings, and a single meal (salad or something low-carb) of about 600 calories for lunch. You end up spending your days thinking only about food. It's an effective diet, but miserable, and as with all such crash diets, you'll gain back a lot of what you lost. I never gained back everything, but I went from a huge 128 kg (282 lb.) to about 101 kg (223 lb.), and I'm currently at 113 kg (about 249 lb.), with daily fluctuations of a pound or so. My A1c was 7.3 at my last doctor visit a few months ago; it's around 6.8 right now.

I'm currently eating on the weekends and on Wednesdays; I fast on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. By "fast," though, I don't mean a true, strict fast: depending on the day, I might have diet soda, a cup of coffee with cream and a sweetener like BochaSweet, some broth (not bone broth, alas), or even a spoonful of unsweetened peanut butter (about 200 calories). Apparently, I'm so insulin-resistant that even these non-sugary foods are enough to spike my insulin. Insulin is good insofar as it's a blood-sugar-reducing hormone, but it's bad insofar as it's a fat-storing hormone: if you spike your insulin, you're making it hard to lose weight.

So I'm still fat because (1) I never stopped being fat, even when I got thinner after the Newcastle Diet, and (2) I'm cursed with a body that, short of actual starvation, likes to hold on to fat. I'm also now trapped by the fact that I can no longer exert myself by going to 80% of my maximum heart rate for any length of time: doing that would lead me to have another heart attack. So unless any of my readers has any better ideas, the slow-but-steady, low-carb route seems to be the most viable for now.

3. How can you possibly be fat if you're walking across the country every year?

I consider this a rather stupid question. Think it through, genius: I take about a month off every year to walk across South Korea. That leaves me with eleven months during which I'm no longer exercising at that level because of my job and other factors.

And as I've discovered over time, your body gets used to certain activity levels. The first time I did a long walk across Korea, in 2017, I think I lost over 10 kg, and I was delighted. The next time I did such a walk, in 2019, I lost a lot less—maybe only 6 kg. Part of the problem, too, was that I'd gotten into the wrong mindset of "If I'm expending 4000-5000 calories a day on walking, I can eat whatever I want," which turned out not to be true. The timing of when you eat matters, and if you eat a lot at the end of your activity day, you're not doing yourself any favors. You're better off eating earlier in the day, like an old-school Buddhist monk who stops eating at noon.

If anyone has any other prying, asshole-ish questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

and just like that, a new blog is born

None of us really has any idea whether we'll live to see tomorrow. In my case, this point has been brought home to me several times: in 2021, I had a minor stroke that resulted in weakness on my right side, a much slower typing speed, and balance issues that plague me to this day, preventing me from properly putting on and taking off my pants or tackling steep mountain trails, and reducing my typing speed from a once-proud 142 wpm to less than 50. In 2024, last year, I was diagnosed with heart failure in the spring—sometime around March or April. I had gone in with severe breathing problems, and the somber-looking staff came back with a hangdog look and told me I had severe left-ventricular systolic dysfunction—a label that's been burned into my brain ever since. As I found out later, most cases of heart failure start in the left ventricle. 

A few months later, I had a full-on heart attack, and not a mild one, either. I saw security footage of the incident since I had no memory of what had happened: the camera caught me trying to climb a staircase, but I stumbled onto it and didn't recover right away. When I finally got upright, some solicitous women asked me whether I was okay; I waved them off (the video had no sound, so I'm editorializing). I then stood there a while as if slowly deciding what to do, after which I collapsed backward, rolling/crashing to the floor. 

From what I heard while I was in the hospital, at least three people did CPR on me: a store staffer, a retired doctor who happened to be on scene, and, presumably, the hospital trauma team that finally arrived. I also had no sinus rhythm, so I had to be zapped twice—defibrillated. When I woke up, I had no memory of the heart attack (I still don't, thank God), a tube down my throat, and a catheter in my nethers. I couldn't speak, but my boss, who is Korean-fluent, and who was once again my bohoja (guardian), told me gently that I'd had a heart attack, had been taken to the ICU, had gotten an emergency stent placed in a coronary artery, and was now in the cardiac ward. Maybe a day or so had passed since the incident. 

I spent about a week in the hospital; my brothers and my best friend all came from America to see me both while I was under medical care and after I had gone back home. It was great to see people I hadn't seen in years, but I felt guilty about ripping them out of their lives. The worst part of the experience, aside from the general weakness arising from having had a heart attack and having been in bed for a week, was the awful pain in my chest resulting from all the CPR I'd received. It was hard to resent the CPR, which had kept me alive (several docs had used theological language like 기적/gijeok—miracle—to describe my survival), but damn, the pain was intense, and every time I coughed for sneezed, the pain would return. The docs told me it'd be about a month before the pain went away, and sure enough, that's about how long it took.

With a stent where my blockage had been, I recovered over the next few weeks, and I was well enough to contemplate a long walk along the 385-kilometer Nakdong River bike trail, which winds its way north, then west, then north again, then east, always along the Nakdong River, starting in Busan, then passing through Yangsan and Sangju before shooting almost straight east for the famously traditional city of Andong. 

I felt good enough to do the hike, so I set off on my journey, but disaster struck along the way: a really heavy rain fell one day, soaking my feet, and instead of tending to my feet as I should have, I soldiered on, soaking my skin and incurring huge blisters on my right foot that turned into a raw, shallow wound that looked a lot like second-degree burns (see this pic of my foot from last year for a comparison). I thought about continuing the walk despite the wound since my feet have already been numb for years from diabetic neuropathy, but I decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and I didn't want to risk gangrene and possible amputation.

So for the first time ever in years of walking across Korea, I took a break, came back to Seoul, and spent a month gently convalescing while I worked at the office. I spent all of November healing, then returned to where I'd left off, in the modest little town of Hyeonpoong, in early December. I did the rest of the trail, had an awesome finish in Andong, and basked in the bittersweetness of the walk's end: I'd done it yet again, but the walk had been interrupted by my stupidity. (To my credit and in my defense, I'd made sure, upon returning to the walk, to tape my feet up very well so as not to incur any more scary blisters. Mother Nature also obliged by giving me cold-but-pleasant weather for the entire latter half of the walk. I do love walking in cold weather.)

This year, then, I had a choice: as a guy with heart failure who is essentially living on borrowed time (and I think I feel some of my blockages returning), do I do my favorite walk—the Four Rivers path—from Incheon to Busan, or do I do a "redemption walk," i.e., the same route I'd done last year, but without fucking stopping this time? After some indecision, I finally elected to do the latter. Assuming I survive until next year, I hope to do the Four Rivers trail once again in 2026. The Four Rivers is a significantly longer trail (633 km), and it's got more hills that a guy in my condition will have to take very slowly, but as long as things don't get much worse, I think I can do the trek next year.

So welcome to this year's walk blog. I'm Kevin, and I'm living on borrowed time, but I'm not going to let my health define me. I've done a trans-Korea walk almost every year since 2017, when I was first inspired to walk by an athletic Canadian YouTuber and videographer who filmed his bike trip from Seoul to Busan using a well-edited combination of drone work, selfie-sticks, and his GoPro. What I saw in that video captivated me; I'd spent all my years in Korea living in cities or shuttling back and forth between cities, and it had never occurred to me that most of the country didn't look urban. Cities are where the people are, after all, but as I discovered, if you want to see a very different—arguably richer and deeper—Korea, you have to get your ass out of the urban spaces and into the sunlight, under the big sky. This non-urban Korea is a wilder place, less about man-made things and more about nature. Sure, there are artifacts of civilization everywhere—bridges and dams and roads and bike paths and scattered buildings: in a country this small, you can't avoid civilization. But there's a hell of a lot more nature out there, not to mention plant and animal species you've probably never seen before. I've photographed a lot of these critters, some of which an American will recognize, some of which are more native to East Asia. So, yes—get out there. See what is to be seen.

Like last year, this year's trek will be only 20 days long on the calendar I've planned out. In reality, it might not work out that way if, say, I have to take an extra day to rest or if (and this would be rarer) I skip a rest day and forge on ahead. As in previous years, I'll be following the blogging format that I've grown comfortable with: I'll take hundreds of photos while I walk, but I'll upload only ten select photos per day, and there'll be the usual prose commentary. But the real work comes when I get back to Seoul at the end of the walk: I'll upload the rest of the photos, caption them, and add whatever commentary I'd neglected to write during the walk itself. That's probably going to take me until the end of December. I'm sure a lot of readers will give up by then. Wimps.

For the moment, with summer's heat and humidity finally simmering down, I need to concentrate on doing increasingly frequent practice walks—14K out to the Jamshil Bridge and back, 18K down to Bundang, 26K out to Hanam City, 33K from Yangpyeong to Yeoju, and 35K from Hanam to Yangpyeong. I need to see whether I'm still capable of such walks, and I need to know whether I'm going to be spending twenty days flirting with a heart attack. I mean, I'm not too worried if a heart attack happens while I'm all alone on the trail: if I die, I die, and I'll at least have died doing something I love. That's not a problem. But at the same time, I'm not suicidal, and if I can avoid dying too soon, that might be nice. But we'll see. A new walk is about to start, and my feet need to get back into condition. So welcome to the blog, and follow along as I prep for this latest trek, then follow the trek day by day as I upload my updates.

Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome! 환영합니다! ¡Bienvenidos!