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!