Getting Ready
So how are we preparing for our pilgrimage? Since we made the decision to do the Camino
de Santiago about 18 months ago, there have been so many different aspects to “preparing”
that we’ve realized that it’s good we’re both “mostly retired” and have the
time and resources to spend. Getting ready means we needed to make sure (as least
as “sure” as any future human endeavor can ever be certain) that we planned for
what we needed to do to get ready for the two months we’re on the road in September
& October but also what needs to be done to take care of things back home
in Maine as winter looms ahead and our beehives and gardens will need their own
preparation.
We’ve focused on four main areas of preparation for the
Camino itself:
- Our bodies
- Our gear & clothing
- Our travel plans
- Our minds
The first thing that needed work was our bodies and took the
longest time to get ready. After 20 or so years of not doing anything really physical,
Joan & I were- to put it bluntly- way out of shape, overweight and frankly more
couch potatoes than pilgrims. Sam couldn’t walk more than a mile even after his
series of operations in 2009-2011 and Joan wasn’t much better, even though she
had a natural advantage of being “only 60”. Sam will celebrate his 79th birthday
somewhere around Pamplona in September, so I had all the other natural disintegration
that accompany the human aging process.
So we created our Training S Curve to chart our preparation.
What’s an S Curve, you may ask? It’s
something we’ve been using for any complex activity-for Christmas dinners, our
25th wedding anniversary party a couple of years ago and now our
Camino training program. Here’s the S Curve that is posted on the kitchen wall
where we’ve plan & keep track of what we’re doing every week- how far we
walk, how many days per week and what weight we’re carrying.
Since our normal
daily walk on the Camino will be between 10 to 15 miles and we’ll be carrying
backpacks of around 15 pounds with all our gear and clothing, we needed to slowly
build up to that capability. Maybe at age 25 it would be OK just to hop over to
Spain and start walking -but we’re not 25 anymore!
So in March 2013 we started in the melting snow walking
various side streets and pathways around our home in Arundel. Our first walk
was two miles, carrying nothing but a water bottle. Over time we’ve built up
and yesterday we walked 10 miles easily with no pain or incipient injuries
afterwards. A week ago, we walked the Eastern Trail for 13 miles carrying a 12
pound backpack. In August the S Curve plan calls for us walking 10 miles four
times a week carrying 15 pounds. I figure we’ll have walked around 400 miles in
our preparation period. From what we hear, that’s a pretty good base.
Luckily Joan & I both walk at almost the same pace. We
started at a pace of about 2.5 miles per hour and now are better than 3 MPH. We
call ourselves “Team Turtle” (Joan is T-1; Sam is T-2) and our motto is: “We
start slow…. And taper off!” But we get
there in the end and enjoy the journey even as the younger or fitter speedsters
past us by in their hurry to get to the finish line.
