I finished my
Camino Frances 3 weeks ago and my feet are still sore. I walked from SJPDP to Santiago. I was not an experienced long distance walker - I'm a city boy with lily-white feet. I trained for a full year before starting my Camino. After 2 months training in hiking sneakers, I developed plantar fasciitis in my left foot. Orthotics were prescribed. My left ankle is weak so a wedge corrected the weird structural angle and the resulting constant strain to my left foot. By the time I started on my Camino, my PF was well in obeyance. BUT after a couple of weeks walking my feet became extremely sore each day - what a surprise, I hear you say. My right foot has a matching benign orthotic made of the same material as the left one. From the beginning, I had removed the original inner soles from the boots I bought to support my bad ankle. The orthotic material is extremely hard - carbon fibre. I wore one pair of very comfortable hiking socks, no blisters at all.
My right foot became very sore - worse than the supposedly bad foot, then gradually the left foot became more sore than the right! But it was never the PF pain, which had been extreme and debilitating, I would have had to stop walking. After about 3 weeks I decided to experiment because I wondered if I was favouring the right foot and taking the brunt with my left foot. I bought a Scholls gel shock absorber inner sole and used it in my right boot only. My left foot quickly became much less sore! After about a week, both feet improved. By Santiago, I had been walking with this 'odd couple' of inner soles for more than 10 days. Still much soreness but less. I never used painkillers because I wanted to pay attention to what was happening.
Of course, with all the walking, my legs became MUCH stronger and I lost weight, so the whole picture changed and I had to allow for a differing set of circumstances. It seemed to me that foot strike became a major issue. Always a contributing factor, of course. I'm thinking of walking 400kms of the Via Francigena next year, but if I do I will try to find boots that fit as wonderfully as the boots I've been wearing for over a year, BUT which also have some kind of shock-absorbing structures built in. On the Camino you're walking on pavement and very hard surfaces almost half the time and that surface gets to feel harder and harder every day.
Some people on this forum seem to regard blisters as being 'part of the experience' and so concentrate on a solution/solutions after the fact instead of prevention. As a result of research and experimentation, I didn't expect blisters and didn't get any. Blisters would be a colossal distraction and would compound any problem, I'm very sure. Some people seem to regard the Camino as some kind of penance or ordeal which is to be 'toughed out'. My attitude was and still is: it's difficult enough why make it any harder?
My feet and legs became VERY stiff by the end of each day's walking - I haven't done a postmortem with my physiotherapist yet, but I expect that massages would have been a big help in preventing overall soreness buildup. I had planned on having massages on each of the 3 days off I had scheduled into my Camino. Didn't do it. Next time I will absolutely do that and I unreservedly recommend doing so. Extreme stiffness effected my walking style increasingly during the later part of each day and I wouldn't be surprised if this contributed to posture/walking style changes which increased the strain on my feet. Another thought re stiffness: If I had been an experienced distance walker, I suppose my muscles would have been much better at recovering quickly from soreness - waste products might have been expelled by more efficient circulation.
My suggestion: Give yourself PLENTY of time to train and learn about your body. Every body is different. Confer with experts along the way as you train. NOTHING you do to prepare will be as hard a grind as the full Camino, but I think that training is essential if you start out with a problem to solve as I did.
Many people I met along the way had walked the Camino in sections over a few years. This is an intelligent approach, I think. Unless you're out to test your will and resilience as I now think I was. It was a fascinating adventure and it was very likely happenstance that I didn't have to learn about 'failure' too.
Buen Camino, - Mike
