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The only way I could do two stages is if there was a horse pulling the coachHas anyone noticed this?
I am on the meseta part, and it's fiercely competitive, people getting up at 5am, to storm ahead of everyone else.
It's a bragfest when they reach the albergue, having done 2 stages in a day.
I am not talking about the cyclists, or people taking bus, or other variants.
Exactly. I know lots of pilgrims ( certainly no braggers) who are capable of walking 40 plus k.per day.The last time I walked the Camino Frances I found the fiercest competition was far more about finding bed space first rather than covering the greatest distance. Can't recall anyone being specially boastful about how far they'd walked that day. I can see it might rankle though. I usually average about 30km but the odd 40+km isn't that unusual. Some people just enjoy a longer stretch of the legs. And who is to say what "2 stages" are? If someone walks it in a day it is one stage. Just a longer one than you might choose for yourself.
The last time I walked the Camino Frances I found the fiercest competition was far more about finding bed space first rather than covering the greatest distance. Can't recall anyone being specially boastful about how far they'd walked that day. I can see it might rankle though. I usually average about 30km but the odd 40+km isn't that unusual. Some people just enjoy a longer stretch of the legs. And who is to say what "2 stages" are? If someone walks it in a day it is one stage. Just a longer one than you might choose for yourself.
Long may you linger @malingerer.Mind you , if I live much linger (84) I will probably be campaigning for handrails and escalators up the Pyrenees
I've met people who were genuinely puzzled that I was not walking Brierley's daily stages. One woman was quite shocked and said "Are you allowed to do that?"Who made up the stages?
Guide books are no bible, just recommendations
as they say, "Hike your own Camino"Has anyone noticed this?
I am on the meseta part, and it's fiercely competitive, people getting up at 5am, to storm ahead of everyone else.
It's a bragfest when they reach the albergue, having done 2 stages in a day.
I am not talking about the cyclists, or people taking bus, or other variants.
Have you tried out the lifts in Pamplona? Great to whisk you straight up and not have to run up the slope like the bulls do... just do your walking and your gifting of your poetry, Samarkand. That's enough.The only way I could do two stages is if there was a horse pulling the coach
I intend to be King of the Snails with a 10k max god willing per day when next I go anywhere near the Meseta ! I love it to bits and am always glad to see the pilgies hurtling past and then complaining there is nothing to see! I love the silence and the emptiness (apart from the wall to wall sea of pilgies) and do my best to get out of the way of the speed freaks. Mind you , if I live much linger (84) I will probably be campaigning for handrails and escalators up the Pyrenees
Samarkand.
Didn't you once say that you had worked for Ordnance Survey? That would explain so many things over the years...I’ve always relied on imperial measurements. 25 miles is nowhere near as far as 40 kilothingies.
I've met people who were genuinely puzzled that I was not walking Brierley's daily stages. One woman was quite shocked and said "Are you allowed to do that?"
Has anyone noticed this?
I am on the meseta part, and it's fiercely competitive, people getting up at 5am, to storm ahead of everyone else.
It's a bragfest when they reach the albergue, having done 2 stages in a day.
I am not talking about the cyclists, or people taking bus, or other variants.
I also wonder if "they" are all as "fiercely competitive" as the OP interpreted.I wonder what these 'fiercely competitive' people will learn and remember from their Camino experience?
I had the same thought.I also wonder if "they" are all as "fiercely competitive" as the OP interpreted.
Which is why I strongly discourage people from reading lots of Camino books or watching the ever increasing number of Camino films and videos before they leave.Perhaps because, increasingly, I feel that pilgrims have preconceived ideas about going on Camino before they have even set foot on Spanish or French soil ... perhaps not surprising with this flood of blogs, videos, books, and social media platforms with ready-made information about what "The Camino" is going to be like ... or has to be like
Everyone has their own pace. However, hopefully the ego of bragging will diminish if the Camino becomes part of their heart.Has anyone noticed this?
I am on the meseta part, and it's fiercely competitive, people getting up at 5am, to storm ahead of everyone else.
It's a bragfest when they reach the albergue, having done 2 stages in a day.
I am not talking about the cyclists, or people taking bus, or other variants.
.. Loads of Spaniards, albergues closed....
I have walked the Camino twice (2015 and 2018) and I always got up early nearly every day but especially when in the Meseta. I enjoyed my walks in the dark, especially when there was a moon; and generally reached my reserved albergue early afternoon. I took regular breaks and met many wonderful pilgrims who stopped to ask if I was ok and generally slowed down a bit and walked with me for a mile or two. I took about 50 days to complete my walk. I'm looking forward to walking it again in 2023 at the age of 85! Buen Camino.Has anyone noticed this?
I am on the meseta part, and it's fiercely competitive, people getting up at 5am, to storm ahead of everyone else.
It's a bragfest when they reach the albergue, having done 2 stages in a day.
I am not talking about the cyclists, or people taking bus, or other variants.
This "let me tell ye" ... made be smile.I walked the first week from SJPP last september. Let me tell ye... It was tough to get a bed. In my group, 2 people quit around Logrono. A combination of factors... Loads of Spaniards, albergues closed....
I hope you do not mind if I come in with a comment about other pilgrims. Or walkers, if they decide they are not pilgrims, that is their business. Competitive or combative - whatever. Now that I have begun to think out loud - which is how I know what I actually do think about something! Hang on: I just checked the title. So what if anybody walks 35 or 40kms a day? I can tell you, Jimmy, as a most unkempt Scottish tv character (Rab C Nesbitt) might say: what has that got to do with me, as a pilgrim? Sweet nothing. Necessity ( no beds in Portomarin) caused me to have to do that one day, two days from Santiago on the CF. 2006, if you don't mind! By then I could, stamina is a wondrous thing! I know my limits, and I know where the permission given to my feet to stay going comes from - and it is unaffected by anybody else. Knowing myself, and the reality of accommodation options on the Ingles, I chose to book, as I knew I would otherwise be sleeping on the side of the road, too late for any albergue along the way! It is of no consequence to me how many kms anyone else walks, or how fast or how slow.I walked the first week from SJPP last september. Let me tell ye...
It was tough to get a bed. In my group, 2 people quit around Logrono. A combination of factors... Loads of Spaniards, albergues closed....
We got word back from the front... Everything from sarria onwards is booked out... That's without talking about competitive, combative walkers
Here's our take: after we arrived back in the States after our first Camino, we were filled with overwhelming sense of regret ... why in the world didn't we take MORE time? We had it to take ... we actually had more time that we could have taken—and didn't. Not this time. We've decided to do no more than 10-15 km's per day and take even more time enjoying the people and places and walking. We are planning for a 60-65 day Camino because we want to and we can. More pictures, more sightseeing, more rest, more relaxation, more listening to God. We realize we are in a small minority, but we're going to take in everything the Camino will give us.The only way I could do two stages is if there was a horse pulling the coach
I intend to be King of the Snails with a 10k max god willing per day when next I go anywhere near the Meseta ! I love it to bits and am always glad to see the pilgies hurtling past and then complaining there is nothing to see! I love the silence and the emptiness (apart from the wall to wall sea of pilgies) and do my best to get out of the way of the speed freaks. Mind you , if I live much linger (84) I will probably be campaigning for handrails and escalators up the Pyrenees
Samarkand.
exactly...(and I'm from the US)????? Ahem, the Camino francés is in Spain..... What exactly were they expecting and what's the issue with Spanish people camino-ing in their own country?
exactly...hike in July and tell me that those few hours from 5-9am weren't a delight with cooler temps. 3:00pm...in the Spanish heat, took a LOT out of me.My first 2 caminos I was out the door walking for around 5am in the dark. It was nothing to do with being fiercely competitive, it was about starting when the temperature was nice and cool and also there is nothing as nice as seeing the sunrise whilst hiking. I walked until I was ready to finish for the day and would be anywhere between 20 & 45km, 30km being the norm for me. Might be different next month when I start from Saint Jean as I'm older and currently have a painful IT Band so no hiking / training at the moment. It will be what it is I guess.
I got hot and shrunk an inch trying to read this.Off topic, probably, but it was my new learning yesterday, and @Tincatinker reminded me of it with his post above...
MEASURE FOR MEASURE TIME, WEIGHT AND DISTANCE
If we could not measure then we could not build cities, trade goods, or carry out scientific experiments
Of all the disciplines that enable human flourishing, measurement is perhaps the most overlooked. It’s a practice that can be traced back to the world’s oldest civilisations and has since become interwoven with everyday life. If we could not measure then we could not build cities, trade goods, or carry out scientific experiments. Yet we often take for granted those units of length and weight that make up this global language. We don’t often stop to ask ourselves, why is a meter a meter? Why an inch an inch?
For each unit, though, there is a fascinating history, that explains not only why seemingly arbitrary lengths and weights have been retained over the millennia, but why measurement itself is so important to our world.
Meter
No unit reveals the political importance of measurement more than the meter. It was first defined during the French Revolution, when the country’s intellectual elite, the savants, set out to create a system of measurement that would embody revolutionary ideals of universality and rationality.France in the 19th century was burdened by a confusion of measures that encouraged exploitation and stymied trade. Defining the value of units was a prerogative of the nobility, which led to a profusion of weights and measures across the country’s provinces. It allowed local lords to take advantage of their subjects – weighing payments of grain in larger units than those used by peasants at the market, for example – prompting a common revolutionary demand for “one law, one weight, and one measure”.
The metric system was invented to overturn this and the other inequalities of the Ancien Régime, with new units derived from the latest scientific knowledge, and the meter itself defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator.
This definition required a seven-year survey of France to calculate the length of the meter, and a much longer campaign to encourage citizens to use the thing. The work was not an immediate success, either, and France would not only become the first country to adopt the metric system, but the first to reject it, too. It would take decades of political accommodation for the meter and other metric units to be accepted in Europe, but as Napoleon Bonaparte presciently declared after the savants’ work was complete: “Conquests will come and go but this work will endure.”
Inch
If the meter shows how units of measurement can be designed from scratch to solve specific problems, the inch demonstrates the importance of historical lineage.The inch is one of the oldest units in continual use in the English-speaking world, with the first written definitions stemming back to the Middle Ages. Around 1150, King David I of Scotland defined the unit as the width of the thumb “mesouret at the rut of the nayll.” Though, in order to compensate for the natural variety of the human body, this was given the addendum that the length should be taken as the average of the “thowmys of iii men, that is to say a mekill [large] man, and a man of messurabel statur, and of a lytell man.”
Two centuries later, King Edward II of England offered a new interpretation, declaring that “three grains of barley, dry and round, make an inch.” (Interestingly, the barleycorn was for many years its own unit of length, and survives today as the gradation of shoe sizes in English-speaking countries.)
Deriving units of length from the body and from nature is the oldest form of measurement. These include units such as the ancient Egyptian cubit (the length from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger), the Roman passus (a pace of around 1.5 meters), and Arabic qirat (equal to the mass of a seed from the carob tree, from which we derive the modern unit of the 200-miligram carat, used to weigh precious gems). Such units are useful because they are always accessible, more or less consistent, and appropriate in scale. But over time, demands for precision and uniformity outweigh ease-of-use, and “natural” units must either be standardised or replaced.
Kilogram
The kilogram was created alongside the meter and so shares its political origins. In fact, it was derived from the meter and defined in 1795 as the mass of a single litre of water (the litre itself was the volume of a cube with sides 10 centimetres in length). It was an appropriately straightforward definition and meant that anyone with a meter bar in hand could define the kilogram and check its weight. In theory, anyway.The savants soon ran into problems, though. Try to replicate this experiment yourself and you’ll discover that a whole range of factors affect the mass of a litre of water, from salinity to temperature to altitude. The definition was found to be so frustratingly approximate, in fact, that it was jettisoned, and a lump of metal forged to define the kilogram instead. (This happened twice: first in 1799 and again in 1889.) In other words, although it was more ideologically satisfying to have a definition of the kilogram anyone could replicate, it was more practical to define by fiat.
The story doesn’t end there, though, for even the most stable metal is liable to change, and in the 20th century scientists discovered that the kilogram was losing weight. In 2018, scientists voted to redefine the unit once more, basing its definition not on any physical matter, but on immaterial constants of nature (in this case: quantum calculations involving electromagnetic forces). Every unit of the metric system is now defined in this way, based on phenomena such as the spin of atoms and the speed of light. Such calculations can only be replicated in a few labs around the world, but they ensure that the units we use are unchanging – until we want to redefine them again.
Degree Celsius
Units such as weight and length are intuitively understood, but some phenomena, such as temperature, are so subjective they seem to resist accurate measurement. For most of human history, temperature has been measured only approximately. The ancient Greek physician Galen was one of the first thinkers to suggest there might be degrees of hot and cold in the second century AD, but he thought just four gradations would cover the necessary variations. By the 1500s, natural philosophers such as Galileo had designed early thermometers – glass tubes filled with liquid that rose and fell in response to changes in air pressure caused by heat – but such devices were still extremely imprecise.By the 17th century, thermometers had improved but thermometry still faced challenges. For example, how do you check your thermometer is reliable, if you don’t have a reliable thermometer in the first place to compare it to? The solution from scientists was to seek out stable thermometric phenomena – events that always occurred at the same temperature and could be used to check a thermometer’s accuracy. A number of suggestions were put forth, from the melting point of butter to the heat of blood, freshly drawn. But after much experimentation, two reliable candidates emerged: the freezing and boiling points of water.
It was the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius who applied this discovery most fruitfully in the 18th century, placing the two watery markers at either end of his thermometer’s scale and dividing the range between them by 100. As testament to the often arbitrary practices of measurement, though, Celsius’s original thermometer was actually backwards: he thought that water should freeze at 100°C and boil at 0°C.
Seconds
Why is a second a second long? Well, one oblique and fundamentally unverifiable explanation is: because you have 12 finger bones in each hand. Let me explain – backwards, if I may.The second is currently defined as “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.” To simplify a little, this means that scientists fire a laser at an atom of caesium-133, which flips back and forth between two energy states, giving off tiny electromagnetic pulses as it does like the ticking of the world’s tiniest clock. We count these pulses – all 9 billion-plus of them – and that constitutes a second.
If 9 billion-plus seems like an arbitrary number it’s only because we want our current definition to match the previous one, which measured the second as 1 31,556,925.9747 of the year 1900 (you have to choose a specific year because variations in the Earth’s orbit around the sun mean they differ slightly).
That definition itself had been used to replace another fraction: 1/86,400 of a single day. And that, in turn, was used because the 24 hours of the day had been divided into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds.
These base units of time get their names from these divisions: the minute from pars minuta prima, Latin for “the first very small part” and the second from pars minuta secunda, or “the second very small part.” And why 60? Because the ancient Babylonians, who made some of the world’s earliest and most accurate astronomical observations, used a sexagesimal (base 60) numeral system, instead of the decimal one (base 10) we’re used to today.
There’s one final question, though, and this is where we get very conjectural: why are there 24 hours in a day? Well, this is because the ancient Babylonians divided daylight into 12 parts, which were later doubled to cover the night, making a total of 24 hours. They did this because we don’t really know why. One theory is that they were copying the 12 lunar cycles of the year; another is that the number was derived from their mathematical practice of finger-counting, in which you count by touching your thumb to the twelve bones of each finger (which then multiplies by the five digits to make 60).
So, there we have it. Run that backwards and you go from 12 finger bones to the length of the second. And it only took a minute.
* James Vincent is the author of Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement, which was published by Faber on June 2nd
I am 82 and planning my first Camino in September and I am with you! The Camino , I thought, was about the exact opposite of speed competition and ego. I am disappointed to find these kinds of walkers which will not be pleasant to encounter. I, too, plan to walk easily and take in the scenery, the call, the smells of nature and life which I think is what walking the Camino is about. Buen Camino!The only way I could do two stages is if there was a horse pulling the coach
I intend to be King of the Snails with a 10k max god willing per day when next I go anywhere near the Meseta ! I love it to bits and am always glad to see the pilgies hurtling past and then complaining there is nothing to see! I love the silence and the emptiness (apart from the wall to wall sea of pilgies) and do my best to get out of the way of the speed freaks. Mind you , if I live much linger (84) I will probably be campaigning for handrails and escalators up the Pyrenees
Samarkand.
I disagree. If people want to walk that fast, why don't they just do race walking somewhere else. The Camino has been touted as an event where everyone can be themselves and dress, walk, be alone or not, whatever, as they wish it. It should be the freedom to be who you are. It is a shame if people start bringing in competition, next there will be fights about politics and religion. And then we don't need a Camino for that!You are wrong.. by definition there is competition with other people. Why else would people be getting up at 5am, and racing ahead. If you think otherwise , why not arise at 1200 noon. You are naive
Who knows? People in a race in life usually get nowhere, but I do not intend this to be judgmental as each person is where he/she is in life because they are a product of what came before. (I have no idea what I am saying?)Hear, hear!
Who made up the stages?
Guide books are no bible, just recommendations based on albergues to stay in, places of interest etc. Everyone is free to walk as many km as they wish. You may chose 25 km, I may chose 40 km. Who cares? And not everyone who does such brags about it.
don't ever apologize for this...I was in a similar timeframe...not because I wanted to but because I didn't have the timeframe that others seem to haveIn July 2015, a friend and I walked the Francés in 20 days, averaging about 40km per day. This was not to find beds for the night or to get there first. It was because we could.
That was my first Camino. Since then, I've walked the Via de la Plata and the Norte, each slower than the last. And my next will be even slower. There is no wrong way, as long as our actions do not harm another or their Camino experience.
you didn't really learn anything, did you? who died and made you St James?Walk your ow Camino is bollocks advice. It's clear why people are getting up at 5am, to beat the heat, and to get next stage ahead of other people
I did get up one morning at 439, walking the 17km stretch.
I saw a load of people ahead of me. I thought, who the F are these people?
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