But before I do that, I should quickly introduce myself. My name is Andrew. I’m a Canadian English teacher that lives in Seoul, South Korea. And each week here at Culips, I release a bonus episode, where I share some stories from my life, keep you in the loop about what’s going on behind the scenes at Culips, and teach you an interesting and useful English expression. Each bonus episode comes with a free transcript. And you can get it by clicking the link in the description for this episode, or by visiting our website Culips.com.

So, Happy Monday! It’s the start of another brand-new week, and I hope you’ve been doing well since the last time we talked. As I mentioned just a moment ago, today I want to tell you about a decision I made that I now regret. Maybe I was being a bit dramatic in the opening, and I made it sound like I made a big mistake or something like that. Don’t worry, I didn’t make a major life mistake. But I did make a decision last month that has come back to haunt me this week. It’s come back to haunt me. That’s a great idiomatic expression. To come back to haunt you. We use this expression when we’re talking about a decision that we made in the past that is causing problems in your life in the present. Actually, we use this verb “to haunt”, H-A-U-N-T haunt, to talk about the supernatural. Like, if a ghost comes and causes problems for a living person, well, we could say that that ghost is haunting that person. But these days, the expression has mostly lost that supernatural meaning. And we just use the expression come back to haunt me to talk about past decisions that have a negative effect on our present day lives.

So, I made a decision last month that has come back to haunt me. And if you’re a regular listener of Culips, you’ll know that I participated in the Sober October challenge last month in October. Now, there were many things I had to do for this challenge, but one of them was doing daily exercise. And since my favorite way to exercise is running, I ran almost every day in October. Well, at least up until around the 20th of October, if I recall correctly. Around the 20th, I felt sick for a day, and I skipped the daily exercise challenge on that day. And in fact, after failing that part of the challenge, I fell apart. I lost pretty much all of my motivation to keep it up and I ended up not doing any exercise for almost the next three weeks. I think it was just a perfect storm. Getting sick and losing my motivation coincided with many other things that were happening in my life in late October and early November. And unfortunately, when I get busy, exercise is one of the easiest things in my schedule to cut out.

So anyways, last October, I was doing the daily exercise challenge. I was feeling good about my body. I was feeling good about my fitness level. And at that time, I decided to register to run in a race, in a half marathon race, and a half marathon is around 21 kilometers long. At that time, it seemed like a great idea. I was high on life. I was high on running. I was in a great mood, and I wanted to take advantage of it by running in an organized race with a bunch of people. I’ve completed a handful of half marathons in the past. The last one I did though, was quite a while ago in 2019, before the outbreak of the COVID pandemic. In that race, I had a great result. I actually came in second place, and I broke my personal record, and I think I finished the race in around an hour and 26 minutes, which is not fast if you are a real runner, but if you’re an amateur runner like I am, especially one in his late 30s, as I am, I think that is a respectable time. Actually, the story behind that race is really funny, and a little bit embarrassing, but mostly funny. But it’s a long story, I think I’ll have to save it for another time. If you’re curious, and you want to know the story behind that race, just send me a message or leave a comment on Culips.com. And if there are enough people interested, I’ll let you know, maybe I can tell you in next week’s bonus episode.

But anyway, I had a great result at that half marathon in 2019. And back in October, when I was running every day and feeling really good. I had this crazy idea that I should do another half marathon and try and break my record. I’m a competitive person, I always like to try and break my personal records and push myself. And at the time, I thought, “Hey, maybe I could cut my record down to an hour and 25 minutes, it’s probably doable seems like an achievable goal.” So, with this dream in mind, back in the start of October, I registered for a half marathon. But then, I totally forgot about it. And then, I failed my challenge, and I stopped running every day. And then, I let nearly a month go by without doing any running or exercise at all. And then, last Tuesday, I got a package in the mail.

I came home from work, and I saw the package lying in front of my front door. At first, I thought it must have been something that my wife ordered online because I hadn’t done any shopping and I wasn’t expecting any packages. But when I picked up the package, I was shocked. I saw that it was addressed to me. “What’s this?” I wondered, and I excitedly opened the package. I thought it was a surprise present or something. But when I opened it up, and I saw what was inside, my excitement turned to dread. Actually, I think I just sighed a long sigh of regret. One of those sighs that’s just like, ugh. Because inside the package was my race bib and a running shirt that the race organizers provide to all of the participants. And it was at that moment that I remembered that I had signed up to run in the half marathon. And what’s worse, I couldn’t remember when the marathon was exactly. So, I checked, and I noticed it was on Sunday, Sunday, the 19th of November, as in yesterday. Once I realized that, I think I let out another sigh of regret. Because last week, I had a very busy week and there was just no time where I would be able to do any extra practice or get ready for the race on Sunday.

So yeah, October me is haunting November me. And now I have to pay the price by running in the marathon. And by the time you’re listening to this, I will already be finished with the race. I’m actually recording this episode on Saturday, the 18th the day before the race. So technically, I haven’t done the race yet. But by the time you hear me, I will have finished the race. I usually prepare the bonus episodes on Sunday. But this week, I’m doing it on Saturday because I anticipate that I will be too sore and too tired after the run on Sunday to sit at my computer and talk to you guys. So, I’m doing it a day early this week. So, I’ll give you an update in the next bonus episode about how things went. My wife told me, you know, Andrew, you don’t have to do this. You can just skip it. And I guess that’s true. But that’s not my style. I’m a cheap guy, I guess, and I had to pay a $35 registration fee to participate in this race. So, if I don’t run in the race, it feels like a waste of money, and I don’t want to do that. So, I’m just going to run and try my best. As I’m sure you probably know, exercise is one of those things that you have to do regularly to maintain. And for me, not running for almost a month means that I probably lost a lot of my fitness level. But I believe I’m still in good enough shape that I can at least finish the marathon.

So, my game plan is just to take it slow and easy, try to enjoy it as much as possible. It’s one of the last races in Seoul before the winter starts. And the weather forecast is predicted to be about six degrees Celsius in the morning and there’s going to be sunny skies. The race is taking place along the beautiful Han River in the middle of Seoul. So, while I don’t expect to be breaking any personal records or winning any trophies, I hope that I can just enjoy a nice morning outside, running with hundreds of people. This is something that I really miss doing during the COVID pandemic. So, now I can do it again. That’s awesome. And I hope that I just won’t end up hating myself too much for that decision I made way back in October.

Have you ever heard, or seen, or smelled, something that unlocked a memory that you forgot you had? That happened to me last week and it was a wonderful experience. I was browsing through the social media website, read it. Do you know about Reddit? If you don’t, it’s better not to search for it because it will just waste your time. Actually, Reddit is the number one place on the internet where I waste time. It’s a social media site, it’s very interesting. But it’s easy to become addicted to it, and I guess I am kind of addicted to Reddit. And last week when I was browsing it, I saw a post about the toy, Lego. Lego. you know Lego, right? Lego is the plastic-brick toy that you can use to build things, very famous toy. The user who made the post asked the question, “What was the first Lego set that you remember owning?” Now for those of you who don’t know, Lego is usually sold in sets. And each set would be part of a larger theme. For example, there were space sets and city sets, medieval sets, pirate sets, and the list goes on and on and on. There are different themes to the toy Lego. When I was younger, Lego was one of my favorite toys. My top two favorite toys as a child, Lego and Nintendo, those were the ultimate best toys.

So, when I saw the post, I clicked on it right away, I was interested in this post. And I immediately felt really old when I saw the post because all of the responses were about Lego sets that were released within the last 10 to 15 to 20 years. And I probably stopped playing with Lego sometime around when I was 13 years old or so, which is around 25 years ago. So, I didn’t recognize any of the Lego that was being discussed on Reddit. But it got me thinking about the Lego that I used to play with. So, I headed to Google, and I searched to see what I could find. Well, I came across this website called Brickset.com. And I was able to browse year by year and see all the Lego sets that Lego has released over the years. I immediately started browsing through the sets from the late 80s and early 90s. Those years were my Lego heyday, probably when I was most interested in the toy.

Anyway, browsing through the Lego sets on this website was so awesome. And it brought up a rush of good memories that I had totally forgot about. I recognized a lot of the Lego sets and remember playing with them as well. One of the memories that came to mind was of one of my first elementary school friends. His name was Paul, and he had an especially impressive Lego collection. He lived pretty close to my home. And I used to go over to his house sometimes after school, and we’d play Lego together. Now best of all in his house, he had this upstairs room, it was almost like an attic room. And he called it his playroom. That was like the room in his house was called the playroom. There was, you know, the kitchen and the living room and the dining room, and the bedrooms and the basement and the garage. And then the playroom. And this was kind of an uncommon room to have, none of my other friends had a whole room in their house dedicated to playing games and playing with toys. So, we used to go up to the playroom and play Lego. And on that website, brickset.com, I saw a lot of the sets that we used to play with. And actually, seeing that website was the thing that triggered me to remember going over to Paul’s house in the playroom and playing Lego with him. So, that was a nice little moment that I experienced last week, when brickset.com, of all things, helped me to unlock that memory that was so deeply buried in my brain that I didn’t even remember having it. If you’re from around the same generation as me and you used to play with Lego too, then check out that website, I think you’ll like it.

Would you mind doing me a little favour? On Friday, we uploaded a new Simplified Speech episode. It’s Simplified Speech episode number 159. It’s called Kassy’s New Hobbies. And in that episode, I talk with Kassy about, well, some of her new hobbies that she’s taken up since she moved to Bangkok in Thailand. And for that episode, we made an interactive transcript. Yay! We’ve been getting lots of requests by Culips members for interactive transcripts for all of our episodes. And finally, we are able to bring this feature to the Simplified Speech series.

The reason why it took us a little while to bring it to Simplified Speech is because there are multiple speakers in that episode, Kassy is speaking. And also, I am speaking of course, and there were a few technical issues that we had to figure out how to get the interactive transcript working properly for that situation. Now, I think we solved these issues. But I’d love it if you could test out the interactive transcript for us with that episode. And if you have any feedback about how it works or how it looks, please let me know. And please remember that it’s totally clickable as well. So, you can click on any word and hear the audio start from that point of the episode. And I think that’s really cool. If you wanted to hear the same sentence again and again and again, for example, you just wait till the sentence finishes, and then click on the first word of the sentence. And you can hear it said again. So, if you don’t mind, visit our website, check out that episode, and let me know what you think. We want to make sure that the interactive transcript is easy to use and comfortable to study with. So, if you have any suggestions for how we can make it better, then send me a message. My email address is andrew@culips.com. Or you could just leave a comment on our website.

And now it’s time for this week’s vocabulary lesson.

Since this episode is about making mistakes and regret, I thought I’d teach you a wonderful idiomatic expression that English speakers use all the time in these kinds of situations. The expression is: to pay the price for something. Or we say: to pay the price for doing something. So, if you pay the price for doing something, it means that you have to suffer in the present because of some mistake or poor decision that you made in the past. In fact, I used this expression earlier in the episode when I was talking about having to run in the half marathon that I registered for. Did you notice when I used it earlier? Did you hear that? Let’s go back and listen again to that part of the episode a couple of more times.

So yeah, October me is haunting November me and now I have to pay the price by running in the marathon. So yeah, October me is haunting November me and now I have to pay the price by running in the marathon.

So, the expression to pay the price is just another way to say, to deal with the consequences of your actions. So, I made a decision in the past to sign up for the marathon. And now I have to deal with the negative consequences of that decision, which means I’m going to be running in the half marathon on Sunday. As always, I’ve prepared some example sentences to help us dive deeper into this expression. So, let’s take a listen to the example sentences now. Here we go.

Example sentence number one
Because of my boss’s mistake, my whole team is paying the price. We have to work overtime every night this week. Because of my boss’s mistake, my whole team is paying the price. We have to work overtime every night this week.

Let’s break this example sentence down. The speaker says that his whole team is paying the price. Why? Because of his boss’s mistake. So, in the past, his boss made a mistake, and that mistake has led to some bad consequences. And unfortunately, to fix that mistake sounds like the whole team at the office is going to have to work overtime.

Example sentence number two 
I’m paying the price for playing video games all night, I’m exhausted. I’m paying the price for playing video games all night, I’m exhausted.

Let’s break this example down. In this example sentence, the speaker says that he’s paying the price for playing video games all night, and that he is exhausted right now. So, I guess he was up all-night playing video games. And then the next morning at work, he was really, really tired, because he didn’t sleep at all. So, he’s paying the price. He’s dealing with the negative consequence of that poor decision of not sleeping at all, by being very, very tired in the present moment.

Example sentence number three
If you don’t take care of your health when you’re young, you’ll pay the price later. If you don’t take care of your health when you’re young, you’ll pay the price later.

Let’s break this final example sentence down. In this example sentence, we hear a speaker give a warning. And the warning is, if you don’t take care of your health now, when you’re young, then later, you’re going to pay the price. Later, you’re going to be sorry. Later, you are going to have some negative consequences. You maybe you will be unhealthy, or sick, or even die early, something terrible like that. So, this is another way that we can use this expression and that is to warn people that there may be a negative consequence in the future if they don’t do something in the present moment.

Congratulations, you made it to the end of this bonus episode. Thanks for studying English with me today and great job on completing an English practice session. If you like Culips, and you find this helpful for building your communication skills, please support us. The best way to do that is by becoming a Culips member. Members get access to a lot of amazing benefits that we worked really hard on making to help you improve your English fluency. Benefits like transcripts and study guides for all of our episodes, invitations to our monthly video live streams for the member community. Ad-free audio and our Fluency Files series, and more. Just check out Culips.com to learn how you can become a member. But that’s not the only way you can support us. You could also leave us a five-star rating and a nice review on your favorite podcast app. You could tell your friends who are learning English to check us out or you could follow us on Instagram and YouTube. So, take care everyone, have a fantastic week, and I will talk to you soon. Goodbye!