Do You Ever Get Used to Walking All Day?

Reflections on Hiking the Trans Canada Trail

“What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning.”

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, from Four Quartets

You Never Stop Starting Over

 
One of the assumptions we carried into the Trans Canada Trail was that walking would become progressively easier. It seemed logical. The farther we walked, the fitter we would become. Twenty-five kilometres would turn into thirty, thirty into thirty-five, and eventually the distances that seemed ambitious at the beginning would become ordinary stages. We had experienced versions of this on shorter long-distance trails before, where the first week gradually gave way to stronger legs, more efficient routines and a body increasingly accustomed to spending most of the day in motion.

                                    
What we failed to account for was that our walk across Canada would not be one uninterrupted journey.  Between the East Coast Trail in 2018 and reaching Victoria years later in 2022, we effectively began again and again and again. Each new year brought another first day, another period of adjustment, and another reminder that experience and fitness are not quite the same thing. We knew how to pack a backpack, how to pace ourselves, how to manage food and water, and how to organize a day around walking. Our minds knew what we were capable of – we had done it in the past – but our bodies still had to remember what it meant to carry weight for ten hours, wake up sore the next morning, put everything back on, and do it again. And again. And again.
 
In that sense, we never really got used to walking all day once and for all. We became accustomed to the life of walking, but repeatedly had to rebuild the body and strength (both physical and mental) that made life on the trail possible.
 

Annually Restarting

 
The first few days of a long walk have their own challenges and rhythm. Packs seem heavier than they should. Feet become tender in places you had forgotten could hurt. Muscles that felt perfectly adequate during ordinary life suddenly roar in pain and cramp up. Even the simple act of standing up after stopping for lunch can require a moment.
 
Eventually much of this settles. The shoulders toughen. The legs begin recovering overnight. Morning stiffness lasts for less of the day and then eventually less of the morning. Thirty kilometres stops sounding like an extraordinary distance and becomes something closer to an average day, then it becomes what you trek by noon. You stop thinking constantly about the act of walking because walking has become the structure around everything else.

 
That transformation is real, and we experienced it repeatedly.  The important word, however, is repeatedly.  Our journey across the Trans Canada Trail was broken by winters off trail, work contracts, trail closures, family obligations, changing seasons and the practical realities of attempting something that lasted for years. Each time we stepped away, ordinary life returned. We still walked and hiked, but there is a considerable difference between going for a walk and living day after day under the demands of a long-distance trail.
 
So every return each year has involved some degree of rebuilding and starting over at the beginning. This can be surprisingly humbling. We might finish one season capable of walking long days almost automatically, then return only a few months later knowing intellectually that we had already crossed thousands of kilometres while physically feeling like beginners again. The experience was still there, but the ability and the stamina to continue were rarely waiting at quite the same level.
 

Fitness Expectations, Bodily Realities

 
Fitness also turned out to be more targeted than we expected. Being capable of walking forty kilometres across relatively level country did not mean we could climb through mountains at the same pace. Weeks of road walking do not necessarily prepare bodies for rough footpaths and backcountry trekking. A body accustomed to dry prairie roads could still be exhausted by mud, while cool-weather endurance offered little protection when the temperature climbs over 40 degrees Celsius.

We learned versions of this lesson from the beginning. When we first set out and had arrived in Newfoundland with long-distance walking experience from the Bruce Trail and several European pilgrimages, we felt capable, yet the East Coast Trail immediately confronted us with steep coastal terrain, moors, strong winds, rain and even a snowstorm – in the summer. Within days, we were questioning whether we were properly prepared for what we had set out to do. The experience we brought with us mattered, but it did not make us immune to the realities of this trail.
 
Years later, mountains did much the same thing. A long run of high-kilometre days in the prairies might have made us feel strong and confident, only for a steep climb or difficult trail surface or a hailstorm in the Rockies to remind us that endurance is never quite as universal as we imagine. 
 
The trail kept changing the test, and our bodies were always less prepared than we hoped.
 

Endurance and Fatigue

 
There was another contradiction we had not anticipated. As our endurance increased, fatigue accumulated as well.  Being fit enough to walk a long day does not mean that the day costs nothing. One thirty-five-kilometre walk can feel surprisingly manageable. A series of them changes the calculation quickly. Poor sleep, an awkward step, a sore knee, several days of heat, or simply carrying too much can begin to compound. Sometimes the hardest day is not objectively the longest or steepest. It is simply the day that arrives after too many other hard days.

 
This reality became increasingly important for us to understand because confidence can be deceptive. After thousands of kilometres, it was easy to look at a distance on a map in the morning and think, we have walked farther than that many times before. Usually we had. But we had not necessarily walked it with today's weather, today's terrain, today's body – or the exhaustion of the past 100 days on the trail built up inside us.
 
To this end, long-distance hiking has taught us to distinguish between what we know we are capable of in principle and what we were capable of safely doing on a particular day.  And no two days are ever the same.
 

Do you get used to walking?

 
This is all the long way around to answering the question -  Do you ever get used to walking all day?
 
Well, the simple answer is yes. Eventually the long days and longer stages stop feeling extraordinary.  The morning routine of packing up and moving on becomes automatic.    Distances that once seemed intimidating become the average. Your body adapts, your stride gets steadier, and spending most of the day moving through the landscape begins to feel strangely normal.

 
At the same time, however – no, you do not get used to walking all day every day.   Just because I hiked 35 days last year on the Camino Portuguese does not mean that I can do it easily next year.  Just because we trekked across Atlantic Canada in 2019 does not mean I can hike from Fort Saskatchewan to Tuktoyuktuk in 2023.  Time away from the trail still changes you.  Heavy backpacks are still heavy.  Mountains and topography are still challenging, and heat can still drain you.  No matter how far you have hiked in the past, your feet and legs can still (and often do) hurt.  Experience one year on one trail gives you confidence.  But experience one year does not give way to an immunity from injury, unexpected weather or poor judgment from exhaustion the next year.

 
From that perspective – what changes for us – year to year and from trail to trail is not that walking becomes easier.  You always have to build your physical endurance back up.  What changed is that we became better at understanding that no matter how tough this process of returning to the trail is – it is just a process you have to get through.  To this end, we became better at understanding that process – the sore muscles, the frustrations, and even the desire to give up.  Over the years we stopped imagining endurance as a staircase we were steadily climbing toward some permanent level of fitness. It looked more like a series of waves. Strength built, faded and returned. Each season began below where the previous one had ended, but usually with more knowledge about how to rebuild. Sometimes the body returned quickly. Sometimes it did not. Sometimes a new landscape made us beginners again in ways we had not expected.
 
Perhaps that is one reason the first few days of every journey continue to feel important, even after thousands of kilometres hiking. The first day always reminds us that previous distance does not walk today's stage for you.  Every morning, you still have to get up and walk them yourself.
 
See you on the trail!