Preparing for the Camino, Part 3

For the final installment of preparing for the Camino, I’ll talk about our training regimen.  Actually, I wouldn’t exactly call it a regimen since that implies something much more rigid and structured than what we’ve been doing, so perhaps routine is a better word.  In short, the routine is walk, walk, walk, and then walk some more. 

Prior to making the decision to walk the Camino de Santiago, our dedicated hiking consisted of our weekly Tuesday hikes with our informal hiking group.  This group meets throughout the year (unless the weather is really bad) and hikes for distances varying between four to seven or eight miles.  In the summer and early fall, we typically drive up into the mountains west of Denver and add some elevation to the agenda, with hikes starting at nine or ten thousand feet and ending at eleven or twelve thousand feet.  We especially enjoy the wildflower hikes in late June and early August, and the aspen hikes in late September and early October.  Once the weather cools down and it starts snowing in the high country, we move back down to the many urban and suburban trails where the elevation varies from 5500 to 7500 feet.  We also manage to get in a couple of snowshoe hikes when there’s sufficient snow at some of the local open space and state parks.  In addition to these group hikes, Jeanette and I have usually managed to get in leisurely walks of two or three miles around the neighborhood a couple of times a week.

None of this, however, does much for preparing for the grind of walking twelve to fifteen or more miles, day after day, while carrying a backpack.  (We always carry a daypack with raingear, basic first aid supplies, and snacks on our longer group hikes, especially on the summer and fall hikes in the high country.  But that’s typically only a four or five pound load, which is much less than the 15 to 18 pounds we’ll be carrying on the Camino.)  So we realized that we had to start being more aggressive in our walks if we were to consider them training for the Camino.

We started off late last summer, at first walking three to five miles at a time, two or three times a week in addition to our weekly group hikes.  Instead of our leisurely strolls, we quickened our pace up to a little over three miles per hour.  After a few weeks of this, we started extending a couple of these walks to five to seven miles, getting our weekly total up to 20 or so miles.  Our training was interrupted in late September and early October while we went on a cruise that we had planned earlier in the year plus a week to see family in Texas and to attend a family reunion, but we got back on schedule and resumed the training walks in late October.  By now, we were getting bored with walking around the neighborhood, so we started walking the urban trails we used with our hiking group.  The Denver area is blessed with literally hundreds of miles of walking trails and bike paths, and we became very familiar with many of them.

In November, I bought new hiking boots and started to break them in during my training walks, plus started trying out and evaluating different combinations of sock types and liners.  Shortly before Christmas, Jeanette suffered a nasty ankle sprain while hanging Christmas decorations, and that set our training back at least a month until she was comfortable walking again.  But we were soon upping our distance to 8 to 10 miles a couple of times a week, with shorter hikes in between.  In February, Jeanette decided it was time to get new boots and go through the same break-in and sock evaluation that I had done earlier.  We were feeling pretty good at this time, doing 20-25 miles a week, so much so that I started thinking about moving our Camino dates up to the May/June timeframe.  Then Jeanette started to notice a dull pain in her left arm while walking, especially when going uphill.  Uh-oh, these were the symptoms a friend had felt before having a minor heart attack.  So she went thorough a series of medical tests and discovered a blockage in one of her coronary arteries.  The blockage was located in a spot which would make placing a stent difficult, so the cardiologist decided to treat the condition with medications and see what happened.  Fortunately, the meds seemed to be working, and in late May, he gave her the go-ahead to walk the entire Camino. 

But during this process, our training had suffered another setback, so beginning in early June we accelerated our walking distance, started using our trekking poles, and added our backpacks while walking.  At first we carried only half of our intended load in the backpacks, but we have slowly brought that up to the full weight of all our gear.  It was with the increased backpack loads that I started noticing the pain from the pinched nerve in my scapular region that I mentioned in the last post, so I’m currently going through an evaluation of backpacks, plus have undertaken a dedicated exercise and physical therapy routine to try to alleviate that problem before we leave.  Also, as mentioned earlier, we have both switched boots as our feet have expanded and adapted to all this walking.  We’re now doing 30+ miles a week, and hope to get that up to at least 40 to 50 miles a week over the next month.  We know we’ll be averaging 12½ miles a day on the Camino, and we hope to make that distance our goal at least three times a week during these final weeks of training.  So little time, so many miles to go...