For our age we are reasonably fit and healthy. We do an awful lot of cycling, regular walking and a little swimming. In February we went to Tasmania for 3 weeks which included some walking and 10 days of cycle touring with panniers. We had concentrated on keeping cycling fit and decided to leave preparation for the Camino until after we returned from Tas.

The chart below is a record of the training we did over the last 10 weeks:

The red squares are walking days, the green are cycling days and the white days were sitting out in the sun practicing drinking red wine and eating tappas.

Walks less than 10 km and rides less than 40 km are not recorded. We did a total of 708 km walking and 846 km cycling.

At the start we were aerobically fit, more so than needed for walking, but not walking fit.

We used the walks to try out different socks, shoes, clothes, etc, and also experimented with day packs and walking poles. The only things we didn’t get to trial were our ponchos as it didn’t rain at all.

Twice we did a four day walk – Raumati to Plimmerton to Wellington to Plimmerton to Raumati – 110 kms. The first time, in our second week of preparation we had tired legs and tender feet with one or two small blisters and hot spots. The second time in the eighth week was much more comfortable, no leg or feet issues and we had learnt to fill our ipods with our favourite music.

We probably didn’t do enough on hills but had no problem with Hemi Matenga, Paekak Escarpment, Wharero Farm, Matai Huka or Mt Kau Kau. We didn’t get to walk in snow or practice beating off wild dogs. One thing we did have to learn was to keep our walking speed down. The key to a long distance walk over many, many days is to walk slowly and softly.

For the last six months Barbara has been learning Spanish using Duolingo, a free online, interactive computer programme. This took about 30 minutes per day.

It will be fun to see how useful that is going to be. Paul practiced weird and wonderful hand gesturing.

Now we are just itching to get started. Keep following us to see how we get on.