I had an MRI done about 35 years ago due to acute pain. I spent many nights in fitful sleep as even the weight of the sheet on my knees would cause me severe discomfort. The injury was caused by my diving across the racquetball court to save the point against my former college roommate. These are not decisions, more like reflexes that cannot be overruled by intellect. Think of a golden retriever and a tennis ball. Same thing.
The results of the MRI were not great. As I recall, the doctor told me that my cartilage is badly torn/shredded, and surgery could not fix it. “You will need to manage as well as you can before the eventual knee replacement.” As a recent college graduate and a newly married man, these are not encouraging words.
Having a year to prepare to walk the 500 miles of the Camino de Santiago is way more than enough. Most people my age prepare for between three to six months on average. If you know me, you know that I don’t like to leave things to chance, and I wanted to tip the scales in my favor in the physical preparation category.
My goal early on was to walk every day and throw in a couple of longer walks once or twice a week. My daily walks are around 3 miles, and the longer walks are 6 to 8 miles. Once in a while, I will walk 12 to 20 miles as my long walk. I am averaging about 30 to 50 miles a week. All of this sounds fairly admirable if I don’t say so myself. However, I don’t mind telling you that I am a little bit concerned about stringing together non-stop days of walking, averaging about 18 miles per day with elevation changes.
My biggest concern is regarding my knees. My knees are my Achilles heels. You may find this hard to believe, but as an adolescent (and really into my 20s), I was a fearless ski jumper. I know, right? That is correct. I spent this period trying to get as much airtime as I possibly could, cramming in some cool aerial maneuvers all before landing, on the hard-packed snow of Northern Michigan. Unlike ski hills today, ski jumping was frowned upon by the Ski Patrol and ski resorts. These days, ski resorts not only support these activities they also create terrain parks for them.
My friends and I needed to build these jumps in secret, which often meant that the landing area was not even a consideration. Ideally, after flying through the air over 20 feet, one would land on a downhill-facing slope, whereby distributing the energy of the skier flying through the air more efficiently. We often landed on flat ground, thereby absorbing 100% of the energy in the knees. I ripped the knees out of more than one pair of jeans from these hard landings.
The only time we had a downhill facing jump was one in which the skier would have to time the descent to fly in between the chairs containing skiers going up the hill on the chairlift. You had to start when the chair loaded with people was lined up with the jump. Once that happened, you pointed your skis in the direction of the jump, and you flew through the air between their chairs and the next one coming up the hill. I don’t need to tell you that it was quite thrilling indeed.
As far as my knees were concerned, this was the best possible option. As far as my face was concerned, my timing needed to be impeccable. Encouraged by the cheers of the people riding the chairs up, I reveled in the maneuvers I could do before landing. Some of the common tricks had names such as: back scratcher, daffy, iron cross, froggy, zutnik, twister, spread eagle, and often a combination of these in one jump. One day, I held the back scratcher a moment too long and my ski tip stuck in the snow, while the heel of the ski made acquaintance with a sensitive area on my backside, and neither could coexist for very long. Something had to give. I am proud to say that my backside won the day, and the ski tip snapped off in the snow while my inertia suddenly (and dramatically) changed, slamming me face-first on the snow, all the while traveling at a prodigious pace.
I heard the cheers from the spectators immediately turn to groans of pain and agony in solidarity with my own pain and agony. Remember the opening of the ski jump crasher on Wide World of Sports, while the voiceover added, “… and the agony of defeat.” That was me. That clip was playing on a repeating loop in my brain while I was sliding face-first to a stop beneath the chairlift. Humbly, I crawled back up the hill to retrieve the broken part of my ski, while I could not recover my dignity.
I remember two distinct things from that day, more than anything else. Number one, my bottom hurt very badly. It should be mentioned that I would regularly sharpen my skis in order to carve better edges. Never in my wildest dreams had I ever considered that the carving might be on me. The second thing, and this is no exaggeration, I remembered how disappointed I was to know that my skiing day was over. I had practiced skiing on one ski before, both right and left skis, but it wasn’t as much fun.
Back to my knees. In high school, I used to be able to plant my foot on the ground, shift my knee laterally, and be able to pop it out with a horrible sound. I thought it was cool when I was sixteen, but a lot of things I thought were cool then turned out not to be cool at all.
Forty-four years later, I am paying the price for the ignorance of youth. A lot of my physical preparation revolves around building the muscles that surround the knee and working on flexibility in order to prevent injury. That is the plan. The reality is yet to be known. I will need to walk 100 miles each week, and then I am rewarded with a day off. I will need to do that for five weeks in a row. The day off will be spent doing laundry and reducing the swelling of my knees.
The distance does not concern me at all. The only thing that concerns me is how my knees will respond to the relentless use. However, I take a very supernatural approach to this pilgrimage and don’t believe for a second that God would give me this desire without giving me the means by which I can fulfill it.
This notion brings up the topic for a future blog, and that is, with the physical preparation well at hand, I have recently added the spiritual preparation for the journey. I started this last month and will continue through the pilgrimage, concluding in May of 2026.
PS, I did get some news skis shortly thereafter, and these were specifically designed for freestyle skiing. I also brought the broken end of my old ski and took it to the wood shop in order to cut a hole in it big enough to stick the face of a clock. So all was not lost.