2014 Walk-for-Water Camino: Life Lessons
1) One day at a time: Micaiah
Day 4 of walking and Day 3 of rain. We had talked to a guy who had walked for an entire month in the rain. Every day.
Two and a half months stretched out in front of us. Maybe it would rain every day. It wouldn’t be the first time, would it? But Mum told us to take one day at a time. We should not walk thinking that the rest of even this week might be wet and miserable, we should just walk today, and if it was raining we would be thankful we had good waterproof ponchos. Of course, it WAS raining!
As it would turn out though, our walk – a walk for water, no less – would be bookended by days of rain, but the vast majority would be under clear skies or mist at most.
So on that third day of rain we were not wondering whether every day would be so miserable, but we were able to be amazed at the density of the fog – for part of the day we had only a metre’s visibility – and we were awed by the rain which drove in horizontal sheets like panes of glass across the mountain!
2) We are like machines: Tessa
That’s what I said one day (and that’s me at the top of that hill too)
You are walking, but you are not actually thinking about the walking. Your body just does it. Your legs just keep moving and you don’t even realise it. In fact, if you want to stop you have to tell your legs to stop moving. It’s a wonderful feeling.
3) Preparation pays: Ella-Rose
Before we went away Mum took us on lots of hikes and long walks. One day we even walked from home into Ponsonby and then home again. That seemed a long way at the time. But it meant when we got to Spain it was not so hard to walk long distances and we ended up being able to walk much much further. We met people who did not train and they were sore and aching even if they walked half as far as we did.
4) Push and be surprised: Levi
You’ve been walking for 20 or 30 kilometres every day for the last two months. A lot of the time it’s enjoyable, sometimes it’s hard, but you eagerly rise to the challenge....and then there’s a day when you’ve already done 25km, you know there’s another 7km to go and you think you’re not going to make it. You just don’t want to take another step. Not even one. But you do. Everything doesn’t turn suddenly easy. It’s hard, but you take another. You’re not sure if you’re tired or bored or depressed or exhausted, but you know you don’t want to walk. But you take another step. You still don’t break into a victorious run. You just keep taking one step after another. And eventually you arrive.
5) The power of habit: Rachael/Micaiah
We’ve got to the end of this folder without a life lesson. So here are two examples relating to the power of habit. They are not so much about HOW we found our way, but they are related to this picture.
See those shorts I’m wearing? I wore them every day for three months. (Before you get too upset about that, be assured I did wash them. When you do your washing at 2 or 3pm, and it’s a fine day, it is dry by the evening). Anyway, they have two buttons on the waistband. When I got back home to my comfy old jeans, I kept going to undo two buttons each time I needed to take them off. Hardly profound, but it illustrated to me the power of habit. Micki has another example.
M: Mum had an app on her phone called Strava and it told us how far we walked each day – and how high we climbed and how slowly we did it. We got into the habit of walking for a hundred metres or so and then someone would say, “Have you set Strava?” We hardly ever remembered to set it BEFORE we started walking!
One particular morning we had already taken a very steep descent and covered a full kilometre before the question was asked – and at that point Mum realised the phone was back in the albergue. Usually she charged it at night, but last night had been different – the habit was broken – and so she had plugged it in while we ate breakfast in the morning. Because there was no one around to steal it, she left it plugged in while we packed up – another break in the habit, but we really needed it charged as much as possible because we knew we had a very long day ahead of us and we wanted Strava to record our climb. Because it wasn’t habit to go looking for her phone before we left, but just to look under the beds, we left without it.
Getting it back was quite a drama including climbing back up the steep hill we’d just come down, getting caught in the rain, having a dog bite a hole in my poncho, having someone make a phone call for us to the lady with the key to let us into the building, getting her out of bed early, waiting for her and finally getting away LATE for what would turn out to be a very long day with an elevation gain of over a thousand metres. And that’s the day we had almost no food – but we’ll tell you about that later.
....to be continued....
Best of luck - they'll come!
