Another week in Cheongju

I was supposed to fly home yesterday. Or at least that's what my ticket said a few weeks ago, but things never go quite as planned in Korea.

For example: this little buffet item said "Pretzel" on the tag. It sure as hell looks nothing like any pretzel I've ever seen.

So as usual, just before getting to fly home I needed to stay up late to call the travel agency and book a new ticket. In theory, perhaps, one would think that my Korean mileage would be adding up by this point. I have spent 10 weeks in Korea this year after all. But no, I feel like General Pickett at the end of the movie Gettysburg.

General, you must look to your mileage.

General Lee...I have no mileage.

I wouldn't say that this trip to Korea has been my Pickett's charge but in the two weeks I've been here so far I've only managed 31.5 miles. 11 of that was today on a loop out along the river and 10.5 of it was last weekend (see my previous post if you're life is that boring) so that tells you something about how much running I've gotten in on the weekdays.

Last week, when I gloated about getting Saturday off? Well, I paid for that. I ended up getting called in Saturday night and then spent all day Sunday working. I'll be going on 26 days since my last day off when I fly home at the end of this week. That many consecutive days with a median number of hours per day working over 12 is not a recipe for a lot of mileage.

Fortunately, I don't need to have that mileage in the bank today. Last winter I knew Boston was not going to go well for me. I didn't know that it was going to be 3:18:30 bad but I had a good feeling that I was not going to re-qualify. So I started looking at the internet and found a little race in Chicago scheduled for today. The qualifying time was just 3:15 so I figured: "no problem, let's do this!". I talked to Mark and convinced him to sign up for the lottery. Then I was lazy and forgot to sign up.

Mark go in and is running his first Marathon Major today! Good luck and kick some butt!

As it turns out I'm in Korea and wouldn't have been able to run today anyway. This would have been the second time that I would have picked up a DNS at a major marathon. The first time was the 2010 New York City Marathon; that time I got stuck in Korea as well. Neither of those races were or would have been inexpensive Did Not Starts so I guess that sometime it pays to be lazy.

Instead of heading out to the Windy City with Mark and everyone from GLRR and Wicked I went out on a run yesterday in search of the Sangdangsanseong Fortress. I failed. I thought that I could kind of see it along the ridge line from the hotel but got lost on a series of dead end trails and rural roads on my way up into the hills.

Maybe it's up on the ridge line or maybe it's somewhere else but either way I made it to the hills but never found the fortress.

That's about all I have this week. I wish I had taken my phone out on my run this afternoon along the river. There is a serious network of bike paths and running lanes that head out of Cheongju which look to rival the Bike Path I used to run on out from Arlington. They had an old school London style phone box and at one of the round plazas where bike paths crossed they also had a pair of heavy duty bike pumps. The bike lanes were paved and the running lanes were rubberized track. I wish I found this run earlier (and had more time to run it while here).

Tomorrow I change hotels. Here's to hoping that there will be a few more miles to be had before I fly home.

Here's a picture of some red bean buns from the Chinese place at the G-Well Mall across the street from work where we went for lunch on Friday:

Because why wouldn't red bean buns look like this?

And here is a random beer that they sell at the Home Plus in the basement of my hotel:

It's a beer from Illinois that ranks 64 out of 100 on Beer Advocate (or in layman's terms: bad). Why they sell it? I couldn't tell you. Why I bought it? Because they sell it.

Cheer!