Day #26 El Camino
Sunday 8th October
Triacastela > Barbadelo
Distance walked: 26km
A little one today. (great! I hear you finally shouting!)
With a day off the backpack yesterday I felt it was necessary to load up again like a mule and boy did I regret it! Well, not entirely, but what I did feel was the pain having shifted from my left shin to my right upper leg muscle just above the knee. Yep, I still don’t know shit about my anatomy. It’s the muscle that was sore on the left side a week or so ago, so I knew what was happening. It seems I concentrated so much yesterday on not injuring the left shin more that all the stress moved to the opposite leg. Now, every time I walked downhill the right leg felt like I’d been punched fair and square by one of my brothers giving me a dead leg. Any step downhill I was in all sorts of grief. There was a long long long path going downhill at one point and I met up with 2 Canadians who’d helped me a couple of days ago with some electric machine, we came up to this big slope and laughed our way down in pain as all 3 of us had similar issues. The sight of 3 of us zig zagging would have looked like we were downhill skiers who’d forgotten to wear skis or find snow.
I taught them this trick and even introduced the backward walking to them. They’re welcome.
There was only one solution today, and that was to find an Albergue with a pool to relax in. I’d been going heavy on bags of ice the last couple of days but now I wanted to stand waist deep and pretend I was a sportsman after a big match. Essentially I am, I am doing half marathons every single day for a month, but I’m just not being paid like a professional athlete. Oh well. The pool in this almost hotel like place was nice and the shower was also pretty damn good too. The town consisted of no store and only the restaurant attached to the albergue. I devoured a meal in the evening after lounging in and out of the pool in the afternoon. It was a relatively short-ish walk by my normal standards but felt like an extra 5km with the leg pains. I climbed up to my top bunk hoping for a good night sleep. I am starting to look forward to this all being over so I can collapse and sleep for days.
¡Buen Camino!