Benchmarks

Weather and schedule have not been conducive to my training regimen.  I have been getting out at most three times a week, sometimes as few as once, for a walk that is pleasant and moderately challenging, but far from long enough.  I have been carrying the pack for about three weeks, but yesterday and today, I left the pack home.  Yesterday, it was brisk and in the low 30's, today it was near 70 degrees (take that meteorologists).  Today I was walking with a ticked off eleven year old, and we were setting a good pace, I could tell by the fact that we kept passing people (because the park was more crowded than it generally is in February) and because I was really getting winded, sans extra weight.  I've clearly got some work to do over the next two months.  I'm going to have to get serious about my diet again, I'm going to have to stop making so many excuses for not walking. I'm going to have to stop a lot of the self-delusion that led me down the primrose path to diabetes mellitus.
I've got a really long walk to get ready for.  I've got most of the gear, I've got plane tickets, but today I found out that I've definitely gone downhill fitness-wise since last summer.
In a related vein, I was talking this morning at church with someone about the spiraling nature of the spiritual journey, how your general sense of well being and connectedness to God can kind of ebb and flow, and how it's important to try and grow through it, that maybe you take a couple steps forward and sometimes a couple steps back, and how you generally have to retrace some ground you have maybe already covered, or so you thought.
You can compare it to exercise for sure.  It's not much of a stretch, but what it rather crucial to note in both cases is that your self discipline is ultimately going to fail.  It's not being defeatist, it's being realistic to admit that if your diet, your exercise regimen, or your prayer life is based solely on your own ability to buckle down, you're going to fail, and you're probably making yourself miserable in the process.
Here's a crooked spiral for you: I know I'm going to spend almost 40 days walking, I know I've got to prepare for that, meaning that I need to shed a few pounds and get my body in shape and my boots broken in.  At the same time, I know I'm going to spend almost 40 days walking, and that absolutely is going to get me in shape, I'm going to probably drop at least 10, if not 15 pounds, by the simple virtue of the fact that I will be burning nearly 8000 calories a day, and most likely, while I will be eating well, I will probably not be consuming 8000 calories a day.  It's the most basic of math, but that math is used by yours truly to justify not getting a jump on that whole getting in shape thing, which is absolutely going to bite me in the rear end, if I don't knock it off.
See, I know that the first three or four days on the camino are going to be unpleasant.  I am in no way looking forward to the 10 km ascent of the Pyrenees, which happens on the very first day out of St. Jean.  I am not looking forward to the sheer exhaustion that comes as my body learns to process everything more efficiently and without so much waste.  I know all of this is going to happen, and no amount of preparation is really going to stop it.
So, the logic goes, why bother, why delude yourself into thinking that you can just work your way through that nonsense in advance? You can't, the Camino is going to hurt you in the beginning, and then your body will adjust, or so that's the story.  What I'm trying to do is not avoid the pain, it's to avoid the breakdown.  I'm going to have to fight dehydration, which I recognize has happened to on both of my recent backpacking trips, I'm going to have to really stretch out my walks, double, triple, maybe even quadruple the length, by the ides of March.  It needs to happen so my body doesn't flat out let me down.  I'm not as bad as I was four years ago, but I'm not as good as I was two years ago.  I have lost my Pennsylvania hill climbing lungs, and I've picked up some "we eat out too much" baggage around the middle.
This is the benchmark at two months until departure: I've got some work to do.