Slow Travel Part II: The GR-11 is not a race
This morning from our campsite near the Refugio de I’Illa in Andorra we watched as ultra-marathon trail runners loped past after 9 hours already on the trail. We had just woken up.
But the GR-11 is not a race. At least it doesn’t have to be. The truth is it can easily become a race on a daily basis. This should be avoided.
We are currently nearing the end of a month-long walk. We are hiking a big section, about 25 days, or 427km, of the GR-11 trail that runs from the west to east coast of Spain along the Pyrenees mountain range.
You can’t travel much slower than we are traveling now. I have previously written a blog post about the joys of slow travel, focusing on when we were travelling slowly by bicycle through the Netherlands and Germany. Now we are going even slower.
Averaging 15–20kms a day, this works out to be about 5 times slower than cycling, when we were traveling 60–100km per day. It’s hard work, especially with a big pack on, but I love that walking allows us to go places we couldn’t otherwise go, even on a mountain bike.* The remote scenery tends to be more stunning, and we are definitely further away from civilisation (although I’m starting to realise you’re never too far from civilisation in Western Europe).
On our bikes we were riding through multiple villages each day and staying at commercial campgrounds. We bought lunch and dinner fresh each day and often also ice cream. Now on our hike we stock up on about 3 days worth of food at a time. Our staples are cheese, chorizo and bread (by day 3, stale bread) for lunch and either rice, pasta or mashed potato for dinner. We pass a refugio (hiking lodge) almost every day where it’s possible to buy meals, but we are saving money by only stocking up in village stores. We do tend to get a beer from the refugios every afternoon though. How could we say no to that?!
While we’re not so far away from safety, and not as far as I expected from civilisation, it’s still a new experience for me to be hiking so many days in a row, and it comes with it’s own challenges.
One unexpected challenge has been finding my pace. It turns out that even when you’re traveling by the slowest possible mode of transport – by foot – there is still a spectrum from fast to slow. And if you want to enjoy yourself it’s important to find the place on that spectrum that works for you. Like running an ultra-marathon you have to spread your energy reserves over the whole distance each day, so starting too fast is just going to make things more difficult for you at the end of the day.
I have found that on the trail it can be easy to get caught up inadvertently in an undeclared race. A race to keep up with your trail buddies, or to stay in the lead spot ahead of them. A race against the guide book (which in our case tends to beat us to our destination each day by about 2 hours); against the signposts with their estimated times, and against other hikers who you end up leap-frogging throughput the day. Often on a particularly log day it is also easy to get caught up in a personal race to get to the finish point of the as soon as possible because you’ve just had enough.
But as soon as I get caught up in a race, I find myself spending less time looking around me at the. mountains, the plants, the butterflies, rocks, snakes and sky. I find myself less willing to stop for a swim, a photograph or to drink ice cold water from a waterfall. And if I’m not here walking in the mountains to enjoy nature, what am I doing here?
*Not long after I had written these words we were overtaken on the trail by a guy on a mountain bike. I was not impressed. Okay I was kinda impressed. But I was also later vindicated when a hiking friend who was ahead of us on the trail reported that he saw the mountain bike being carried and pushed much of the way.
