Training for the Way!

12 week training program! Your journey begins now!




Training for 'The Way of St James' is a strategy for looking after your body, finishing your pilgrimage and reducing the inevitable pain that will come from walking day after day and carrying your backpack. It is imperative that your footwear will make the distance. Wear in your boots and ensure your socks are comfortable. We both decided to purchase new boots after a couple of weeks training and never looked back. By wearing your well fitted backpack whilst training, you are also preparing your neck, shoulders, back and legs for the endurance ahead. We knew that we would hurt, no matter how much training we did, but we wanted to be fit enough to enjoy the challenge.

The general rule of our training was to walk everyday and then slowly build up mileage.

We started with a goal of an hour walk on a week day and then on the weekends a 10 km hill walk followed by a longer flat recovery the next day.

After a month we had built up to 20 km per day on weekends but usually still walked a hill followed by a recovery flat. Adding the pack was next. Starting off with about 3 kgs and working up to 10% of our body weight.

A couple of weeks to D day and we were walking at least an hour every weekday and hill walking over 20 km both Saturday and Sunday, always with full pack.

                                                              Just do your best Darling!
                                                                     Buen Camino!

BUEN CAMINO!

The thud of the walking sticks reverberate though our bodies, the crunch of our dust coated boots drones across the stone strewn path and the pain invades the body.  The Camino supposedly takes the walker on three distinct journeys - one of pain,  meditation and finally a journey of faith and spiritual development.

The Camino is a brut; thus far, it has provided us with wonders: the sun setting over vineyards, where the first buds are awakening from the winter's thaw, across mountain plains that divide two nations. We have crossed valleys alive with colour,  poppies sway in the morning breeze and a kaleidoscope of greens, pinks, yellows, reds and blues greet us. Forests swallow paths as fingers of sunshine dance between trunks and yoga moves are performed next to cascading rivers framed green with the flow of glacier water.   On days such as these the camino has provided us with its own mediation quality and opportunity to reflect.

There are also days where the Camino punishes you.  It provides you with utter bone numbing, brain zapping, zombie like boredom.  It throws you across freeways, where the smell of exhaust fumes sting your eyes, it takes you through industrial estates where the remnants of the homeless linger, through residential properties, to operational factories that typify the oxymorn of recycle and pollute.  The Camino spawns graffiti everywhere and at times becomes a commerical wonderland where slogans such as 'smile you are the 10,000,000 to walk the Camino this year' scream sarcasim to the profound 'it's smiles not miles that count', or if it doesn't challenge you then it wont change you.'.

We have felt all of these emotions thus far, but the what has stood out is a sense of liberation and adventure!

Buen Camino.