Why the Camino?

Good question!

At various times over the past few years, I’ve tried to devote some effort to managing my weight and improving my fitness. These periods of activity have tended to last for a handful of years, but each has been followed by prolonged periods of relative sloth and inactivity. At the moment, though, I’m in the third year of a healthful cycle and, happily, there’s no end in sight. It’s been made up of lots of training (averaging around 30K running a week), a few half marathons (Gold Coast, Sydney, Melbourne and New York City with more to come), several distance walks and some other bits and pieces.

My distance walking career over the past couple of years has taken me to the Blue Mountains near Sydney (the 45K 'Six Foot Track' three times), Tasmania (the six day Overland Track), New Zealand (the Milford Track, twice, and the Routeburn Track) and to the north of England. There, I walked the 315K Coast-to-Coast track from St Bees in the west of England to Robin Hood’s Bay on the North Sea. For 13 days in September 2014, I followed the track through the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and the North Yorkshire Moors. Like all the other walks, it was a wonderful experience but that one really whetted my appetite for longer distance walking.

Through that period, I’d come to hear, vaguely, about the Camino but had never bothered putting it on a ‘to do’ list. There were a couple of reasons for that. First, I’d only been to Spain once - for a very short time while Eurailing around Europe in 1990 - and wasn’t at all impressed with the place. Madrid, particularly, felt very unwelcoming - unlike northern Europe and Scandinavia where I tended to gravitate to. Second, I’m not an especially religious person and certainly not Catholic, so the apparent focus of the Camino on that side of things wasn’t an attraction.

It wasn’t until seeing the excellent documentary film “Walking the Camino” in mid-2015 that I changed my perspective about it and decided it was a walk that I wanted to do. I suppose my main motivation was a physical one - can I push myself, day after day, to grind out 800K in the height of a brutal Spanish summer? But I’m also open to the spiritual side of the walk that so many writers and bloggers talk about - the almost mystical transformational capacity that days and weeks of trudging along the Camino seems to confer on otherwise unsuspecting pilgrims.

As for finding the time, mid-2016 appeared to fit with the scheduled end of my 18 month Masters of Public Administration program at the University of Sydney. Coincidentally, there was also a window of a few weeks in my running program between the Gold Coast half marathon (probably my favourite race) on 3 July 2016 and Sydney’s iconic City to Surf 14K race (which will be my 23rd) on 14 August 2016.

Voila!

So after searching and booking various international flights to and from Europe (via Singapore and London), and train travel to the start, that leaves me with precisely 34 days to walk the 800 kilometres from St John Pied de Port to Santiago de Compostela, before immediately heading home to line up to run the City to Surf early in the morning after I arrive. By that time, I imagine I’ll probably have to remind myself not to take my walking poles to the start line.

My Camino

As you can probably gather from its title, this blog is intended to document my forthcoming travels on the Camino Frances in July and August 2016.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Camino Frances, a brief overview. It's one of several Camino pilgrim trekking routes across Spain and parts of Europe - each known individually as the "Camino ..." - that generally seem to converge on the town of Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain. The Camino Frances appears to be by far the most popular of the various Caminos, with many thousands of pilgrims from across the globe starting and finishing their Camino at various villages and towns along the way.

From what I can gather, the conventional long-haul Camino Frances route, which is the one I'll be taking, starts in the small village of St Jean Pied de Port in southern France, at the foot of the Pyrenees. From there, it's a quick 800 kilometres across the northern part of Spain to the finish line in the great cathedral at SDC.

In preparing for this journey, I've stumbled across several blogs that some extremely erudite pilgrims have written about their own Caminos and the thought occurred to me, since I'm going to be walking the walk, that perhaps I should also give it a go. I'm certainly not new to the blogging game, being the author of two other reasonably long-running blogspot blogs that record some other aspects of my life. (If you're interested, "PengoQuest" details my various attempts to break the world record high score on a 1980's video arcade game called Pengo; while "BQQuest" chronicles my attempt to run a marathon in a time that will qualify me to enter the Boston marathon, the holy grail of marathons. That qualifying time, which is age-based, is known in the trade as a "Boston Qualifier", or simply a "BQ".)

But despite this blogging pedigree, I can guarantee you I won't be anywhere near as entertaining as some of those other Camino blogging folk out there. Although if you do enjoy it and/or get something out of it, great. If you don't, well that's blogging I guess. I can assure you there's plenty of other Camino blogs out there that you can profit from.

The plan is to try and write up and post my journey day-by-day from the time I leave my home town of Sydney, Australia, on 4 July 2016 to the time I leave Spain at the scheduled end of the trek five weeks later on 11 August.

Before then, and in the next few posts, I'll take you through some of the preparations and other bits and pieces relevant to what promises to be a very interesting little adventure.