The First Exercise in the Art of Conditioning

This morning Matt and I drove up to Yellow Springs, Ohio (home of Dave Chappelle, Antioch College, and countless lesbians) to hike along the bike trail that runs between Yellow Springs and Xenia, Ohio. The trail was paved, with little to no incline, and we saw nine deer during the traverse. I wore hiking boots with two pairs of socks and Matt wore old running shoes with nubby, old cotton socks. Somehow, I was the one who ended up with the (gargantuan) blister.

What was decidedly un-pilgrimage-like about this particular trip was that, besides the fact that we only hiked ten miles, we hiked five miles toward Xenia and five miles back to Yellow Springs. That aspect of the hike caused me to wish I was going "somewhere" other than a trail marker (like to hot soup and a cold ale, which we did end up getting later), but doubling back was necessary at some point, since we had our one car.

I made the unintelligent move this morning of throwing on a hiking skirt instead of pants, thinking it would be warm like yesterday. While the legs got a little wind-burned, they were all right aside from when the well-meaning , but idiotic Yellow Springs native with the Black Lab decided to tell me I looked cold --- which was the exact moment when I started to feel freezing.

Fortunately or not, Compostela and its Camino will probably not be much like a rainy November day in Ohio.