The Camino Portuguese is an approximately 245km long Christian pilgrimage trail, which starts at the cathedral in Porto, Portugal and then ends at its architectural namesake in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain, but it isn’t just for the dogmatically inclined. The Portuguese Way is undertaken by people of all backgrounds and for all kinds of reasons, though commonly as a part of one’s personal growth. However, regardless of the multitude of possible personal life or spiritual perspectives, it’s also simply a very scenic and interesting 1-2 week long walk.
Here I highlight the most special moments of my own camino, ones in which I’d become utterly absorbed in the sunlight’s exquisite play with the continuously unfolding environments, as well as the consciousness awakening primal sounds of moving waters in the multitude of rivers and streams that I crossed along the trail.
“If you feel that you can’t go on, and your will’s sinking low, just believe, and you can’t go wrong. In the light, you will find the road.”
‘In the Light’ | Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti (1975)
So, please just sit back, relax and enjoy this brief sidetrack from the hustle and bustle of regular life; and please share this post with anyone who you think would find it inspirational or helpful. Obrigado, gracias & thank you!
I’d set out north for Lapland to do a 100 mile trail running race through the Pallas-Ylläs National Park. While I have gone further in multi-stage races, this would be my first attempt at covering this distance non-stop. Even though I had been able to train consistently for this race, I’d only been able to do so for 6 months since I’d made the decision to go. So, to save you the suspense, I ended up with a DNF after 42 miles due to a series of events that sealed my fate; and while I would obviously have loved to have made it to the finish line, regardless, I am thankful for the much needed reality check and lesson in humility that this experience afforded me.
So, what happened? Well, I managed to sprain my ankle rather badly after just 16 miles, which instantly forced me to re-evaluate my race strategy. Any kind of running was now certainly out of the question. I could still manage to walk, but the rough terrain made it hard to even do that at a pace that would get me to the first checkpoint at Pallas before the cut-off time. Even though I was participating in a race, my primary goal was to experience the magic of the midnight sign over the fells, valleys and lakes of this amazing place, and so I decided to proceed and just see what would happen. As things went, I ended up spraining that very same ankle two more times over the next 10 or so miles, but luckily catching it just in time on both occasions to prevent any further serious damage.
Despite being forced to drop below my planned race pacing schedule, I calculated that I might still have a chance to make the first cut-off time at the 42 mile mark, and I could then make a decision as to whether I could, or even should, proceed. However, fate had another plan for me, which had already been sealed an hour before the race start. The race had been due to kick off at 1pm, but as our bus had broken down on the way to the start, this ended up forcing a one hour delay. The combined butterfly effect from this and my ankle injury created a situation where I ended up spending two extra hours walking over the exposed elevated landscape after midnight with the ambient temperature falling fast, particularly as the wind blowing across the tops had picked up quite a bit. As a consequence, I felt my body rapidly starting to shut down.
By the time I’d reached the Pallas aid station, I was on the verge of hypothermia, despite the small miracle of actually making it there before the cut-off. However, with only just 25 minutes remaining, I had no hope of warming myself up fast enough to make it safe for me to proceed. I basically had no choice at this point, other than to accept the reality of the situation, and so my journey simply fizzled out right then and there. Once I’d warmed up again over the next hour or so, I was ready to jump on the bus back to the race base in Äkäslompolo … and, unfortunately, with still relatively fresh legs. That certainly gave me a strong dose of ‘what could have been’, but there was no point entertaining those thoughts any further, as it would have changed absolutely nothing.
In retrospect, now that I’m back home, it can be very easy for me to make excuses for my ‘failure’, but I’ve simply chosen not to see it that way. In the end, with this being my first race in over 12 years, and with only 6 months of specific race preparation, it was always going to be a tall order to make it to the finish, even if everything had gone according to plan. So, I will just take this experience as a valuable status check of both my physical and mental fortitude, and be grateful that I still had the privilege to experience the magic of the midnight sun in Lapland while roaming over new terrains.
In a strange way, I’ve actually now become even hungrier to test and go beyond my limits. However, perhaps the best way for me to do that is not via contrived and arbitrary time-limited events, no matter how interesting and amazing they otherwise might be. Maybe the race I need to run is the one within, where I proceed at exactly the right pace that my soul will have set for me at any given moment, while being fully in tune with the landscape that I’m navigating over. The quote by Steven Wright, “Everywhere is within walking distance, if you have the time.”, could well now become my mantra going forward. What then remains for me to do, is to simply free up more time for moving forward along my chosen path, and for however long that may take. In that regard, please allow me to already introduce to you my new travel companion Matilda a Segunda or Matilda the Second.
Just 10 days out from attempting my first one hundred mile trail running race, which is being held in the Pallas-Ylläs Tunturi National Park in Lapland, I headed of for my final race simulation session. On this final long preparation effort over 18 miles, while fully decked out in my race kit, I set out to move at an average pace 1-2 minutes per mile faster than I hope to be able to maintain during the event. My race aims are not to strive for the fastest time I could possibly achieve, nor is it the position I may finish in. It isn’t even about making it to the finish line under the 35 hour time limit. Rather, my goal is a very simple one, to go beyond what I have ever done before, and see what’s there.
For the past 6 years, I have trained Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, but my background is actually in endurance sports, namely triathlon and running, including ultrarunning. However, the last event I’d attended was the week-long multi-stage Marathon des Sables footrace in the Moroccan Sahara desert back in 2012. Since then, my endurance efforts have all been in the form of hiking camino trails and doing long bicycle tours.
So, am I ready to rumble? Well, I’ve managed to train specifically and consistently for this one hundred miler for a solid 6 months. As I write this, I actually feel that my physical condition is on par with what I took to the MDS, but I believe that my mental state is clearly the strongest that it’s ever been. So, I think I should be ok, but you just never know, as there are so many variables that can change beforehand, and then, of course, during the race itself. Having a degree of uncertainty present is very important for keeping motivated. After all, if you already know the end result before you start, where’s the fun in that? And while finishing under the cut-off time would certainly be nice and all, the deeper rewards that I’m seeking out are, in fact, spiritual in nature. They are obviously of the intangible kind, and can be revealed, should I be so graced, by first engaging, even suffering, in a prolonged physical, mental and emotional trial over the trails.
I don’t exactly know why I stopped racing back in 2012. All I remember is that after I’d returned from the Sahara, the fire to keep competing was no longer there. Maybe I’d just had enough of relentlessly pushing myself to excel at the expense of many of life’s other offerings. I guess the time for change had arrived, and so began a long process of re-examining and recalibrating the things that would give real meaning to my life. I can now say that I’ve been well established on this path of deeper self-awareness and discovery for the past 7 years. In a way, I’ve completed a full circle by finding my way back to something I love, but I’m now able to see it with new eyes and a healed heart. I’ll, of course, have to wait a while longer to see what revelations, if any, will manifest over the trails in Lapland, but the experiences that I’ve already had during my longer training sessions have been, at times, nothing short of magical. I’ll no doubt write about all that in detail at a later time, but let me just reveal, for now, that it goes hand-in-hand with the thoughts and research of Professor Donald Hoffman, an evolutionary physicist who studies consciousness from the perspective that time and space are not, in fact, the fundamental qualities that form our physical reality. Yeah, it’s like that.
So, how did this race simulation end up going? Well, I pretty much lost all sense of time, as I became totally immersed in my movement over the local trails, some of them being rather technical, which required quite a lot of extra attention to ensure that I could maintain my balance, literally and figuratively, and not my get ankles and self-belief totally rekted. Anyway, everything turned out very well. My planned pace was right on point, and I was able to manage the physical demands by eating and drinking as needed. I thoroughly enjoyed flowing with the amazing nature that surrounded me, and I ended the session in a relaxed and optimistic state for what soon awaits. To that end, I now commence my final taper to (hopefully) make it to the start line in the best physical and mental shape possible. As for what happens after that? Well, we’ll just have to see.
run for your life 