Spain: These Legs are Made for Walking

Spain:  These Legs are Made for Walking

 

I knew this trip was one I really wanted. After all, I’d been planning for almost two years. I’d applied for two or three different credit cards, just for free air miles to get me across the world. I spent all summer long reading books about this opportunity.

But it wasn’t until I sat at the front desk of my gym hyperventilating that I realized exactly how MUCH I wanted it. I had wanted to walk the Camino de Santiago ever since Martin Sheen made that movie “The Way.” I put together this whole training plan—walking, hiking, strength training, hills, stairclimber with a pack on my back, the works. I was gonna train from February through August, and would hit the Camino just before September began.

First came the race injury. In April I signed up for a fundraising half marathon, and somehow tweaked my knee. X-ray. MRI. Conversation about possible surgery. Physical therapy—lots and lots of physical therapy. Slowly, gingerly I resumed my training. Did a few hill walks with my pack on. Walked a lot. Did strength training at the gym. That is, until the day I fell and ripped my leg open.

I’m not sure they’d seen an injury quite like that one—we had a whole box’s worth of gauze pads taped on it, and it still bled if I moved my leg even a little bit. That was a difficult morning—when I wasn’t hyperventilating, I was desperately trying to find someone to come get me and take me somewhere: home, urgent care, emergency room, anywhere but the gym (where face it, nobody wants to see somebody bleeding and crying).

I hyperventilated again when they cleaned it, and again when the doctor sewed 16 stitches in a leg I was hoping would carry me 500 miles beginning in just a few weeks. I worried all week when it didn’t seem to be getting better. When they diagnosed a medication-resistant infection, I cursed the people who don’t wipe down their equipment and hoped it wasn’t staph (nope—Group C strep, whatever that is).

At one point, I had three different antibiotics coursing through my body—I was buzzing inside, and wondered if that’s how chemo feels. The doctor gave me dire warnings about not being out in the sunshine, because antibiotic #3 would give me a terrible itchy rash all over my body. “I’ll never take a sulfa drug again,” she said. Hard to walk 500 miles outdoors without encountering the sun…

I don’t know how many people were praying: for my knee, for my leg, for my goals, for me to be encouraged and brave and actually make this trip I’d been hoping and planning for. And I did. That leg wound didn’t fully heal until I was on the other side of 500 miles of walking—38 days’ worth. But it never stopped me. My knee didn’t keep me from hiking up and over the Pyrenees—1450 meters of elevation gain in my first two days of hiking.

Some would have given up with the knee injury. Others would have let that leg gash stop them. But I wasn’t about to miss this trip! It was the journey of a lifetime.

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