Lessons I learned from my body - Part 1 The Backstory

I was sitting at a table for one outside of a restaurant along the pier in Fisterra. It was a beautiful, mild midsummer evening. The town was bustling at peak Camino and tourist season so it was perfect for people-watching. I had finished walking the Camino Francés from Saint Jean Pied de Port, France, and had made my way to Fisterra through Muxia by way of the Camino on foot. I had reached another turning point in my Camino where everyone I had met along the way had already gone home. So, it was very unexpected to see a woman in normal clothes walking towards me at a brisk pace with her hands waving in the air. She came up to me with her friend by her side and said, “Oh my goodness, you’re the girl with the knee! I had wondered if you were able to finish.” I am terrible with names, but better with faces. For the life of me, I could not understand why I could not place her. Her friend who was with her also did not look familiar. We chatted for a bit before she had to go and catch her bus back to Santiago. Ten minutes later, I remembered exactly who she was. Her name was Karen, she was from the state of Washington, and we had walked together just for a few hours one morning before reaching Belorado. She was wearing normal clothes (instead of the pilgrim clothes I had known her by) and I had never met the friend she was walking with because they had found out they walked at different paces. While I've taken you through this lengthy, elaborate scenario, the point I’m trying to make is that I was remembered as, “the girl with the knee,” of all things.

I had started the Camino Francés perhaps a wee bit unprepared. The only research I had done was figuring out things I needed to bring, but otherwise was planning to walk by the seat of my pants without a plan. I quickly formed bonds walking with people, even at the top of the Pyrenees. We continued to walk with people we grew quite fond of and so our Camino family grew. However, I found myself walking a bit faster than I would otherwise and was stopping less to make up for lagging behind the group. As with many pilgrims, I succumbed to injuries from the descent into Zubiri on my second day, which I found out later was where many injured pilgrims’ injuries started. 

I kept walking. At one point, my knee swelled up something ridiculous and I had to go to the hospital to see if it was something serious. The doctor said that I needed to stop walking for a while...as in several days and should see a physical therapist. My heart sank. Quitting was never an option for me, so I kept walking. What started off as an incredibly injured knee eventually evolved into a knee thing plus severe Achilles tendonitis in both feet. I walked some days in flip-flops because the feeling of wearing socks alone was too painful. I continued this way until Leon when I finally took my first rest day, weeks after all of this had started. I had to make a decision and let my Camino family go and start a new chapter. They had to continue on, but I needed a full day off from the Camino to heal. 

The silliest thing I ever did on Camino was beating my body down just so that I could stick with my Camino family. In my heart, I knew that I would meet other pilgrims, but letting go of people I care about had always been hard. Until I let them go I hadn’t realized that there were still pilgrims behind me who I had seen along the way. But more importantly, there were also pilgrims I hadn’t met yet. I continued on and finished the Camino Francés in time to see my friends before they went home. I only gave myself a day off before walking out to the coast. I didn’t properly rest my body until I was alone at the “End of the World.” Between Fisterra and Muxia, I spent over a week sleeping, wandering around the towns (because I couldn’t actually STOP walking), and processing my Camino in peaceful places. I had never known of fatigue quite like that before, but I could tell that my body truly needed to rest. I eventually got on my way and walked all the way back to Santiago via Muxia. 

In the end, I walked over 1000 km on one injured body and those injuries would take seven months to heal. The most powerful lesson I learned on that Camino was to listen to my body. It was telling me things the whole time that I could hear, but I was too stubborn to listen. It was that lesson that would bring me in to the doctors several months later only for them to discover that I had bilateral hip dysplasia that had gone undiagnosed my whole life. I was pretty accident-prone growing up, but I had never broken a bone nor had I had surgery before. 

I was about to embark on the hardest Camino of my life, years of extensive hip preservation surgeries and rehabilitation to correct the deformities in my hips and leg bones. I had three surgeries with eight procedures in total from July 2020 to May 2022 with continuous physical therapy beyond, just to correct my right side. I had to re-learn how to walk again, which is much more difficult than learning it for the first time. When I first walked the Camino, I didn’t quite understand why there were so many pilgrims that would return over and over again. It wasn’t until I underwent surgery that I understood. As my tolerance for walking increased, it all reminded me of the Camino and it was all I could think about. I started carrying a backpack, and it gave me joy to hear that familiar, “crunch, crunch, crunch,” beneath my feet as I walked along unpaved trails. 

During my training hikes throughout the summer of 2022, I struggled to be able to walk beyond 12 km/ 8 mi. I knew this could be a problem on the Camino. On top of it, I also lacked the confidence in my body to know how far I could realistically walk cumulatively. Since I’m an “All or nothing” kind of person and don’t like doing the same things more than once, I decided I needed to walk one or more of the shorter routes to Santiago. When I was in Ireland years before, I found myself at one of the embarkation points for Irish pilgrims on their way to Santiago via the Camino Inglés. It was there that I had this idea in my head that someday I would return to do a full Celtic Camino starting in Ireland and finishing in Santiago. On paper, it seemed perfect. I would be walking paths in Ireland that few people were doing and the Camino Inglés was less traveled due to its “short” distance (especially important on a holy year when numbers of pilgrims increase dramatically). Not only was the Camino Inglés shortest overall but there were also albergue options in between stages to allow me to walk shorter distances each day (compared to most pilgrims). If my body held up, I could have other options to hop on other Camino paths nearby to keep me walking. September rolled around quickly and most of the logistics of getting to the walks around Ireland were sorted out. I was about 85% recovered from my surgeries at that point (my physical therapist did not tell me this until later because he knew the Camino was something I HAD to do). After more than 2.5 years of surgeries, rehabilitation, pain, sweat, and tears, I was about to embark on my slow camino with destinations unknown…

Stay tuned for the next part.