Hi everyone! This is Kathrin. Recently, I said YES! I said yes to doing something exclusively for myself! This September I will embark on a 3-week 300-mile adventure hiking the Portuguese Camino di Santiago, and I couldn’t be more excited. I have been dreaming of this for many years, and I am finally making it happen!
A lot goes into training for and planning a journey like this, and I have been getting a lot of questions about why I’m doing it, what my training schedule looks like, and how far the route is. I get asked a lot of questions, but I’ll start with these three.
TRAINING
Let’s start with training. It started small with a few 3-to-5-mile walks or hikes throughout the week. I joined a Meetup hiking group a couple years ago and have enjoyed the camaraderie of fellow hikers one day a week at a local nature park. Despite being made up almost exclusively of older retirees, they have more energy than most young people I know. Through this group, I have been inspired by the energy they have for daily hiking, dancing, backpacking, and even snowshoeing adventures. From here, I have slowly added longer hikes over the past year or so, and right now, I am averaging about 100 kilometers (around 60-70 miles) per week.
Most of you know that I love hiking. It doesn’t have to be exotic locales. As a matter of fact, I often prefer to just start walking from my home or in a nearby park to maximize my hiking time and limit driving time. That said, I am blessed to live extremely close to multiple forested parks, many that include healthy climbs to keep me pushing my limits.
I also have a goal of twice weekly gym exercises and weight training to help strengthen my body. This will hopefully increase my endurance to carry a backpack of clothes and gear but also to avoid injury. This weight training piece, as I said, is a ‘goal’ as, at the end of a workday, I would SO rather be out walking than doing weighted lunges, but I am trying…
THE MAIN CAMINO DE SANTIAGO ROUTES
Many of you have heard of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage. Recognizable to pilgrims by its scallop shell direction markers, it is a network of pilgrimage routes throughout Europe which all lead to a cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Spain where the apostle Saint James is buried. The routes themselves date back to the 9th century, and today, more than half a million people hike some part of a Camino each year.
There are five main pilgrimage routes into Santiago de Compostela: the French Way (the Camino Francés), the North Coast Camino, the Portuguese Way, the Andalusian Camino, and the Primitivo. Each one has a different distance, landscape, popularity, etc. Most people imagine the Camino Francés as this is the one that Martin Sheen made popular with his 2010 movie “The Way”. This starts just over the eastern border of Spain, in the French town of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. This trip is 769 kilometers (almost 500 miles) and takes 30-40 days to hike the whole way. (In Europe all the Camino routes are talked about in kilometers, so I am trying to get used to using those.)
Technically, while you only must hike the last 100 kilometers into Santiago de Compostela to receive the coveted Compostela credential (more on this later), around 15% of hikers on the Camino Francés start in France. I have long admired folks who have done this whole route. Personally, I have chosen not to do the French Way this year as I don’t want to take that much time away and am resolved that when I do the French route someday, I will indeed hike the whole 769 kilometers. This one in full is a bucket list goal for the future.
For this reason, I explored the other routes and have landed on the Portuguese Camino. Although around 90% of the pilgrims on this route start in Porto or towns to the north, the Camino de Portuguese technically starts 350 kilometers further south of Porto in the city of Lisbon, making the full journey 599 kilometers. About 1-2% of pilgrimages start in Lisbon, making these stages of the journey from Lisbon to Porto a much quieter trail.
MY CAMINO
After a lot of research, I decided to start in Tomar, a city about 150 kilometers north of Lisbon, avoiding the slightly more industrial hiking days out of Lisbon but keeping the challenge of almost 500 kilometers. While I anticipate meeting many pilgrims on the journey, choosing Tomar will give me eight days of more solitary hiking before reaching Porto where 50% of all hikers begin. Plus, I’ve heard Tomar is a charming historical city famous for being the epicenter of Knights Templar history, which sounds like a lovely place to immerse myself (and hopefully get a good night’s sleep) before beginning my adventure.
To keep my journey under three weeks (and because the town-to-town distances are more spread out south of Porto), I will be hiking several long-distance days. The first week from Tomar to Porto averages about 28-30 km per day, or about 18 miles per day. From Porto through the end, my average stage will be closer to 23 km per day, or 14 miles per day.
I hope to arrive in Santiago de Compostela on Friday, October 2nd where I have splurged on two nights on points at a Marriott while I collect my Pilgrimage Certificate of Completion, attend a pilgrimage mass at the cathedral, and, if I have energy, explore Santiago de Compostela’s UNESCO-listed old town.
WHY NOW?
Thirty years ago, I first read “On Foot Through Africa” about a woman who walked the length of the African continent. Since then, I have devoured countless other books and movies about various long-distance hikes and pilgrimages, including many on the Camino de Santiago. It has always been a draw that I would hike it someday. I have trained for and walked the full Portland marathon many times and have run several half marathons, both of which I’m extremely proud of, but each time, I did not have to do it carrying all my necessities and water, and then do it again the following day. And then again and again. This will be a new test for me.
These days, after many years of being a mother, wife, daughter, entrepreneur, and living hard into these identities, I have realized that in my 50s, I statistically have more than half my life behind me. There has been plenty on my shoulders in the past decade or two. Raising kids, balancing family schedules, helping family, and running our businesses brought stress. I gained weight during COVID, lost my mom a couple years ago, recently supported my sister through a divorce, am a recent empty nester, and my oldest is getting married to his true love the month before I leave. Life is changing, and I want to grow along with it.
Pilgrimages historically aren’t just meant for the pilgrims themselves, but the messages, stories, and inspiration they carry. My pilgrimage isn’t religious but a physical, emotional, and spiritual journey. I know it will be physically and emotionally demanding and the last thing I will want to do some mornings will be to lace back up those hiking shoes, but I’m eager for the challenge and the adventure.
To me, this pilgrimage represents a wellness journey and an emotional challenge, but also so much more. It is an empowerment journey as well. I’m doing it for my mom, who inspired me with her love of travel and adventure. I’m doing it for my sister, who has experienced one of the hardest chapters of her life and is coming out stronger on the other side. I hope to honor the people who have inspired me to do this, but hopefully, I can inspire others along the way. This is for all the people who have had a similar dream and haven’t started. If I can do it, you’ve got this too!
This is a multi-layer adventure, but I have done hard things and feel confident it’ll happen as it’s meant to. For those of you who know me and my love of planning, this alone is a challenge as I like to know what to expect. I do not know yet what it will feel like to be a pilgrim. I can only learn to be a pilgrim by being a pilgrim.
For those of you familiar with the Camino, there is an expression that “the Camino will provide,” referring to the serendipitous events that pilgrims notice when they face a need along the route being filled by a kind local or a fellow pilgrim. I trust it will work out as it needs to, and I am working on embracing that.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
There are so many more questions I’ve been asked that I want to address, but I really cannot continue any longer without acknowledging all the support I have gotten from my husband, Nathan. Aware that this type of pilgrimage has been on my mind for decades, he was extremely encouraging when I mentioned last year that I’d like to make it happen this September. Nathan has supported my training efforts, a shopping trip for the perfect gear, and most importantly, has agreed to handle ALL THE THINGS back home while I am off on this grand adventure.
Having been self-employed for the past 30 years, I have never traveled without my computer and a to-do list of both work and personal tasks needing to be done along the way. On this trip with the long mileage days and needing to carry everything on my back, I have opted to not travel with my computer. Nathan has agreed to handle it all while I’m gone, giving me the space to practice what I think will be the biggest challenge of my trip: letting go. I’m so grateful that he is affording me the luxury of focusing on my adventure.
My gratitude is not just on this trip. I couldn’t have balanced most of the past 35 years without him.
Nor would I have wanted to. Thank you, Nathan!