Camino Day 20 to 26: León, Astorga, Foncebadón

I waited a while to write this post because, frankly, I didn’t know what it was supposed to say.

Last week, after some really painful days, I admitted to myself that something was wrong and took a cab, then train, to León, skipping a few days of walking to give myself rest, but also to visit a larger town with a theoretically more robust medical system.

Spain, as you may or may not know, has a centralized one payer medical system. If you’re a Spanish citizen this means that the government runs an HMO on your behalf, with your tax dollars. If you’re not a Spanish citizen, you pay out of pocket. We very fortunately purchased Geo Blue travel health insurance, which actually has a direct billing relationship with some of the hospitals. This meant that for each appointment/ day of care, my insurance was the guarantor for the procedure and I didn’t pay out of pocket at all. 

I had spoken to a representative of the hospital the night before, explaining what I was needing - X-rays and MRI - and was told to show up at the ER, where it could all be done in one day.

Now, this is Spain, so that was a bit of an exaggeration. I got the X-rays on the first day, spoke to a generalist who diagnosed me with an overuse injury, recommended that I rest for a few days, ramp up slowly and walk with a brace. They also gave me a shot of anti inflammatory meds, which almost immediately improved my symptoms. That doctor also told me an MRI was not required and that I would be completely fine if I followed her orders.

The next day, I was told to come back to meet with an orthopedic specialist, and he felt that I should get an MRI for a potential stress fracture. Ali, having missed her boo, and with some bad blisters took a cab as well, and met me at the hospital after my MRI. 

Now, they say the Camino provides. I was walking in Altra Lone Peaks, which are lightweight, zero drop and have minimal padding. I think that on balance, they did make my feet stronger and more reflexive, but I noted that on the longer days, and especially on the harder substances, my ankles and feet were just getting pounded. Enticed by the cushion and the bounce-in-step that Ali was experiencing in her Merrels, I wanted to see what the local pilgrim store had in stock. Of note is the fact that I wear US 14 to 15, which is huge no matter what country you’re in. I was walking in size 14 but noticed that when my feet were swollen, the 14s were a bit too small. In fact I realized that any pressure blisters I grew had come on days when I wore thicker socks. 

So I wanted shoes with a zero drop, cushion and size 15. I walked into the store, fully expecting it to be the first of many of the day, and walked out with Altra Olympus, in the larger size and with attributes that checked the other two boxes. 

Walking around town, and with the help of rest, some prescription strength anti-inflammatory tablets, and the new shoes, I felt pretty good. Ali and I purchased a proper day pack, to allow me to do a full luggage transfer so I could carry just what I needed during the walk on my back, and we built a plan where I would slowly ramp up, using the bus and my feet alternately.

Late Friday I got word from my client rep that she’d hassled the radiologist and the results came back a bit obtuse. Not quite a stress fracture, but likely an  injury of the subcondral, the soft cartilage and bone at the base of my tibia. The specialist also wanted me to stay and do a doctors appointment on Monday.

So, Ali and I extended our comfortable apartment one more night, she left early Sunday and I bummed around. At this point, I’d decided that I wanted to try to do the Camino still, ramping up as discussed and planned to use the time with the doctor to essentially bargain with him as to how bad a given exercise might be. For instance, what if I biked? What if I walked 10km a day, etc. 

In the end, it didn’t matter. The doctor canceled our appointment and send his notes to my client rep. They recommended no more weight bearing, ie walking with crutches for three weeks, then walking only with a boot for four weeks, and then a follow up MRI. The doctor delivered this news to my client rep with the impression that I would catch my next flight home.

Yesterday, that day, was a hard day. I had a second doctor familiar with my feet give a second opinion and got the same result. I was told pretty unequivocally that further walking would cause “irreversible damage”. 

I was angry and sad and resentful. Why was my body failing me, when so many others hadn’t? People 20 years my senior were still walking, their bones not crumbling under the pressure. I still feel a lot of frustration. I posted angrily on Reddit (huge mistake, I know), asking what lessons I was supposed to learn from this. To be honest, I’m still asking that. It feels blatantly unfair that after getting this far, with the muscles in my feet and legs so much more toned and having lost a fair amount of weight, that I have to throw in the towel. I derive joy from pushing myself, endorphins don’t do much for me unless they are hard earned. I like being tired at the end of the day. But, my soft tissues, my tendons, my cartilage, they didn’t want to hang. I probably masked some of the pain with ibuprofen, kicking the can down the road in some ways, but in other ways? I thought I could out work the failure. I could walk through the pain and as a result my body would catch up. 

My sleep on the Camino has been fleeting, perhaps in retrospect from over exhaustion. I know that when I was training for organized runs, I’d often be too tired to sleep, tossing and turning through the night. Sleep is a huge part of recovery and I regret not having figured out how to sleep better. There’s also a sort of perverse incentive on the Camino that ran against good sleep. Sleeping in private rooms is a much better night of sleep. It’s also much less social, so we sought to make a mixture of shared and private habitations. But those amazing communities tend to be harder to sleep in, not to mention the insane schedule where you eat dinner until 9pm, then sleep immediately to wake at 6am to be on the road as early as possible. And, unfortunately, even if you do plan to sleep later, in those shared environments, you don’t get to choose when the folks around you wake up and rummage. 

Today, after a long consultation with my wife, my mother, my wife’s aunt and myself, I walked a partial day. I mapped out the places where I could plan to stop and call a cab, and once I got to the farthest one, I stopped. I waited for a cab, and I went to the town where we are sleeping tonight.

As we sped by the other pilgrims, some of whom I’d met, and some of whom I now might never meet, I felt the grief that has been plaguing me since my abortive and time wasting attempt at yesterday’s doctor appointment. 

Comparison is the thief of joy, there is absolutely no doubt about it. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about what the Camino was supposed to mean to me. Personally, I wanted to prove to myself that, with the right attitude, I could do it. The guide we followed alleges that the first third of the Camino is for toning your body, the second third challenges your mind, and the final third is about your soul. Well, if my body fails towards the end of the second third, where does that leave me? Am I missing out on a mystical experience that won’t unlock on my half days? These are the unhappy questions that I ask myself. 

As a fat kid who become a fatter adult, then experienced some years of relative fitness, having a body that can’t keep up is pretty triggering. I’ve had my fair share of sports injuries in my 30s, including have to rebuild an ankle a few years ago. After a full recovery from that, when Ali was doing her Portuguése Camino, a random walk with the dogs snapped a bone in my foot. More specifically, a tendon ripped a chunk of bone off it itself, on the same foot. The podiatrists had no explanation, and a bone density scan showed no issues. There was no good reason, my foot just randomly broke.

A year or so later, after months of walking 15 to 20,000 steps a day, having lost weight on this vacation, I thought I was ready to do the Camino. It’s a bitter pill to swallow that for whatever reason, maybe stubbornness or working through pain, some idea that I have to prove something to someone, I wasn’t. 

I pushed too hard, too fast. Maybe I didn’t want to admit to my wife that I needed her to be willing to do shorter days. After all, I reasoned to myself, she doesn’t need to. Our friends don’t need to (this was more or less incorrect, as many of them have in fact slowed down). The people we met in Grañon are doing more KMs per day than we are, why shouldn’t I be able to.

I feel a desire to have a positive impact on the world in a way that requires high visibility and success. Many of those who I admire or idolize have shown a dedication to athletic prowess - the CEOs who do triathlons, the chefs who bike 200 miles a week, the executive directors casually hiking the Appalachian trail on sabbatical. So to not push myself in this way, to not give it all feels like an abandonment of that goal. My logic - flawed as it may be - is that failing to complete a given physical feat, to the standards of excellence of others is a failure to commit to my future success. If I can’t push myself here, how can I possibly push myself in my next business venture.

How can I be a leader that everyone respects and idolizes and thinks represents the pinnacle of achievement, if I am not that person? 

Typing this, I can start to see what the real lesson is, but having gone through a business divorce, especially one that started almost as soon as the partnership was finalized, and having fought through an attempted hostile takeover of a business, being vulnerable is scary. 

I’m not quite ready to accept the lesson, nor even really the fact that in some ways, my Camino ended in Carrion de las Condes. I’m still working through it. A nice hit of endorphins would probably help, but that might not be available for a while.

In the meantime, my wife is available for and expecting me to rely on her. In eight years that hasn’t been an action I’ve done easily, so the easier lesson is to lean into that. 

More thoughts to come soon,

Buen Camino,

Danny