without my heart rate monitor and cycling
computer!
I updated my hiking journal last night. It's a brand new journal which I started when I began hiking again in October. It's a far different thing than the "training logs" I used to keep before I left for Camino.
Back then, I kept a journal for cycling, another for the gym and yet another for hiking. I made careful entries about mileage, time, speed, heart rate, calories burned, weather conditions, every possible fact and figure. I was so obsessed with numbers that it was a major upset whenever my cycling computer stopped working or if I accidentally hit the "stop" button on my heart rate monitor. I would come back from my activity frustrated because I didn't know how I did! I couldn't measure, I couldn’t compare. I had no idea how I fared on that given day.
But, the Camino changed all that. Walking the Camino was a true test of my physical endurance. And there, as I pushed my body to the limit day after day I learned a key but simple lesson. What’s the rush? To get there sooner? Then what, it’s over. As I walked, I understood that the facts and figures that before were so important really meant nothing. It was the experience that mattered, living in the here and now, not pushing to go farther or faster to reach some self-imposed goal. My senses, which after a lifetime of suburban living, had long receded to the background, shot to the foreground. It was a totally new and almost overwhelming experience. I felt the touch of the Camino, absorbed its sights and sounds, smelled it, tasted it. Each day of the Camino was so spend living that moment that I had even forgotten, really forgotten, that the week after I returned, I was moving! And still had much to do before the moving truck arrived.
When I got home, I decided to toss my old journals as I did my final packing. It didn't matter anymore what my maximum heart rate was on a ride that hot day in July or how many calories I burned on that hike on a cold day in January. I wonder now why it ever did. Guess it just reflected the person I was then, not the person I am now.
I no longer wear a heart rate monitor, nor do I even look at the time I start or stop an activity. My new journal is a place for me to recount the things that matter, a retelling of the experience - laughing about the sound of gunshots while hiking through the Pine Barrens and hoping they were shooting in the other direction (as well as wondering why they were shooting in the first place)! Or sharing some beef jerky with a bold little terrier who, along with his person, hiked a full ten miles. Those are just two of the memories from my hike last Sunday. Those are the kinds of memories I want to preserve.
I still keep track of my milage, but it's no longer a gauge by which I measure myself. These days, my quick stroll at lunchtime matters just as much as a major trek up a mountain.
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