View to the coast from the goat track

Living half way up a mountain there is plenty of variety of walking options, and plenty of opportunity to tackle steep gradients – one of the steepest being the concrete track to our house which I have to negotiate on leaving and returning home, and although I walk this track every morning with the dog, it never gets any easier

My normal dog walk is about 3km, which obviously falls far short of the 25km that we will be walking each day on the camino. In order to monitor my progress I have downloaded a pedometer onto my phone. I don’t yet have the shoes or boots that I will be using on the camino, so for the first couple of days I wore my stable boots, then I bought a cheap pair of trainers that will do until I next visit the UK and have a proper fitting for some appropriate footwear. I have no idea where I could be confident in buying walking shoes here in Spain, so will get kitted out for all my requirements during my next visit to Bristol.  Unfortunately this will only give me four weeks to wear them in and practise walking with a backpack.

My first ‘longer’ walk with the pedometer was on 28 January, along the asphalt road that leads from our drive and can link up with my normal dog walk, which clocked up 4.87km. My next walk was through the natural park on very stoney mountain tracks up above the village and then linking up with the road and finally onto the goat track that ends close to our drive, this was some 9.2km. I have taken the shorter walk a few times to test the new trainers, and I extended the long walk to 10.5km a few days ago.

I was hoping to further extend it today, but the weather this morning was awful, blowing a gale and threatening rain, so I didn’t walk at all.

View to Canillas de Albaida from the goat track

I hope to build up to 20km over the next couple of weeks and do this maybe twice or three times a week until we start for real.  At the moment the dog is enjoying the longer walks – he is used to long treks following me when I am riding – but I am not sure he will want to walk 20km, he only has little legs.  Hopefully I will know if it is too much for him.