On the Camino, two things are guaranteed- walking and thinking. Both go hand in hand for me, like rucksacks and boots. I think a lot when walking. Sometimes I think about walking. In the morning, when the day stretches out before me full of promise and potential, my thoughts are often about how much I enjoy walking. Towards the end of each day, most of the thoughts are of the “why on earth am I still walking” variety. This means that I would be a fool if I put any great store in what I think while walking.
Most days I try and be aware of what is going on in my body and just let my thoughts tag along. The danger is that I zone out when my thoughts sync with my walking rhythm. When that happens I don’t feel pain until I stop, which is too late. If I am listening to my body I can adjust everything from posture to pace. The benefit of this is that I have a different perspective on walking.
Falling down the evolutionary tree
I used to think of walking as normal. It is not. It is actually just one of the many gaits that legged animals use, whether they are bipedal or quadrupedal. Elephants walk, crabs walk, humans walk. We do it differently and we have a special relationship with it as it was one of the major changes in our evolutionary story. At one stage we had a foot with a big toe that could grasp branches and allow for all sorts of flexible manipulations. Considering how the thumb on our hand gave us the ability to use tools you would think having an extra limb that could hold something would be the sort of genetic mutation humans would go for, but life had other ideas.
Instead, the flexible toe was swapped for a big padded toe that lined up with the others to create a powerful lever for the rest of the body. The apes kept the flat foot structure while we developed a curved arch. This we use as a spring that stores and releases kinetic energy. It transfers weight from the heel along the outside of the foot, across the ball of the foot which is packed with mini fat-filled pockets and finally through the big toe for takeoff. The major benefit we get from this is energy conservation when moving. We learn it at an average age of 11 months and it means our parents no longer have to carry us around and their hands are freed up to grab a cup of tea.
Everyone is so delighted with the effectiveness of this technique that nobody recognises how unusual it is physically. For a start, one of your feet must always be in contact with the ground at any time to support the whole body. During a brisk walk, your feet can hit the ground 80 – 100 times per minute. You may feel like you are bounding across the modern savannah like a gazelle but you never actually fully leave the earth. Sometimes both feet are on the ground at the same time. That right there is double support. Enjoy that sensation. If you are carrying a rucksack at that moment you will barely feel it.
When you lift your back leg off the ground, you keep your front foot where it is and perform what the world of physical mechanics calls an “inverted pendulum movement”. To do this, you swing or vault your back leg by your stiff front leg. Your body is pushed forward when you swing the back leg in front of the other. You then fall forward in order to allow the lifted leg to touch the ground. Then repeat the process for the other foot.
We call this walking but it is essentially a series of leg vaulting followed by slight falls. From a mechanical point of view, the classiest and most sophisticated of us on the catwalk of life are forever stumbling along. To make up for this, each one of us does this in our own peculiar way and it is classed by the FBI as a soft biometric. Everyone has a recognisable gait that a field agent would be able to use to pick us out of a crowd. Some of us lead with the toe first. Some drop the hips. Some have abnormal tics caused by damage to other parts of the body. This also explains why Irish people can recognise other Irish people walking down a street in New York by the bog way they are crossing the road.
Doing the Camino gave me a new respect for my hoofs, those innocent clods of padded flesh that I tormented. There are 26 bones in my feet, even more joints, over 100 muscles, tendons and ligaments that I use every time I take a step. The skin underneath is thick and tough and it has to be. Under the heel, I have a pad of specialised fat which is like heavy-duty bubble wrap that I use for weight distribution. The ball of my foot is made up of chambers of fibrofatty tissue to absorb the shock in each step and each chamber is full of blood in case I need it quickly. I have been designed to walk.
There are so many nerve endings (up to 200,000 per sole) that I am ticklish when touched and could possibly get aroused although I doubt it as I am definitely not in the mood and am sharing a room with Tony. Each of my feet has roughly 125,000 sweat glands which probably caused Tony problems when I shared a room with him as a teenager. There are many more biochemical processes going on underneath the surface but I’m not going to go into them because – boring. After 50 years of walking, I have already started to lose certain capabilities but I understand the basic physical forces and states involved in walking – pressure, friction and moisture.
The perfect conditions for blisters.
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