Prepare yourself

Autumn, if you ask me. I walked for four weeks from 20 September and got two days of rain in the Pyrenees, then glorious autumn weather all the way to Galicia, where incidentally it always rains a little, that comes with the territory. Spring works well too, say those who know. But avoid high summer – in August there were fires along the trail and the air was full of smoke – and avoid March, when the Pyrenees can be under snow and the first day becomes something quite other than a walk.

The whole Camino Francés takes 28–35 walking days, depending on legs and ambition. If you can't fit it all in, do what many others do: start in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port anyway and walk as far as time allows. Most people come back the following year and walk the rest, and that is no bad plan – it also gives you something to look forward to. If you want the compostela, the certificate, the last hundred and ten kilometres from Sarria are enough. They take four to six days and are full of people, which may be exactly what you want, or exactly the opposite.

Give it at least a week, whatever you do. Kent Härstedt put it best: for the first three days nothing happens, then things start to happen. I can confirm that this is true. The first days are about the body, about feet and shoulders and about why you got into this in the first place. After five or six days twenty kilometres is nothing, and after a week the walking becomes something else, something resembling meditation, except that you don't have to sit still and feel like a failure.

It is the hours that build strength, not the intensity. It took me a while to understand this, since I was one of those who believed that one really punishing workout a week ought to be enough. It is not. Thirty minutes of raised pulse every morning before breakfast, long walks and a little strength training for legs and core – that is the recipe, and the older you are, the more the strength matters. Your body has to carry you seven hours a day for four weeks. That is a full-time job, and one ought to have gone to the interview first.

Walk for hours. Ideally a few sessions of twenty kilometres at a stretch, in your walking shoes and with a packed rucksack, so you find out where it rubs before Spain tells you. Increase the load gradually. And train walking downhill, that is my most serious piece of advice in this section: knees break on the first day's long descent towards Roncesvalles, not on the climb. Stairs at home are not enough for 1,200 metres of climbing, however many floors you have.

Don't rush out. Thirty kilometres and 1,200 metres of climbing with ten kilos on your back on day one is not courage, it is stupidity, and I say it with warmth because I came close to doing exactly that. For eight to ten euros small vans drive your pack to the next lodging, and there is no shame in it. Start carrying once your body and you have agreed on the terms.

Short sessions with frequent breaks beat long heroic marches, every time. Walk two and a half hours, take a break, walk again. Alternate long days with short ones – after 39 kilometres, 15 feels like a day off, and that feeling is one to treat yourself to. Take a proper rest day too, without a guilty conscience. I took mine in Logroño after the first week, in the middle of the wine festival, purely for calibration purposes. The body said thank you. The rest of me found it a little harder to get going the next morning.

The shoes decide everything. Buy them slightly too big, since feet swell in the afternoon, and break them in at home, properly, so that the shoes and you know each other before you spend a month together. Boots that hold firmly around the ankles for the whole Francés; lighter shoes may do from Sarria. And absolutely no cotton socks. Merino or synthetic, three pairs, and change often. It sounds like a trifle. It is not.

Grease your feet morning and evening from the first day, not when it has started to rub, because by then it is already too late. The sailor Lasse Linger told me before I left: a blister in the first week comes with you the whole way. I nodded and thought I was probably the exception. I gave my feet a little moment every evening, roughly the way you water a pot plant you don't really believe in, and after ten days my heel looked like a tenderised schnitzel. Nineteen-year-old Jack, who looked after his feet as if they were a car borrowed from his dad, got a single blister the whole way. Be like Jack.

Dry feet, dry shoes. Moisture in the shoe gives soft skin and friction, and friction is the whole problem. Dry your shoes overnight, wash your socks every evening and never, ever walk in damp socks – borrow the hairdryer from reception if need be, I have done it. If you get blisters anyway: keep them clean, wash with surgical spirit (not hand sanitiser with moisturising additives, or the plaster won't stick), dry and apply Compeed. Rest is part of the treatment, not a sign of weakness.

Drink a little and often, even when you are not thirsty, because the body uses more than it tells you. Get some minerals into you in the heat, not just water. The stretch after Carrión de los Condes is seventeen kilometres without a refill – that is the only time you need two litres. Otherwise the risk of dying of thirst on the Camino is considerably exaggerated. There is a bar in almost every village, and it knows exactly why you are coming.

The benchmark is six to eight kilos without water. I had more. Every beginner has more, it comes with the genre. Four tops and a pair of trousers with zip-off legs really are enough of a wardrobe – you wash in the evening and hang things on the radiator, and nobody on the Camino will notice that you are wearing the same shirt three days running, because so are they. The lady from Switzerland who had walked 104 days was carrying five or six kilos, and she didn't look as if she was missing anything.

The rucksack should be good quality, 30–40 litres, with a proper hip belt so that the hips carry the load instead of the lower back. That belt is the difference between arriving and arriving angry. Poles, absolutely. A rain cover for the rucksack, waterproof trousers for Galicia and a windproof layer for the Alto del Perdón and O Cebreiro, where the wind has opinions of its own about where you are going.

Don't bring gadgets you don't dare to use. My drone became the world's most expensive stone, carried for four weeks and launched about three times, always with the feeling that I was about to lose it. Learn all your equipment at home – what you can't handle on day four you won't be using on day twenty either. Weigh your rucksack before you leave, and be honest when you read the number. The full packing list is further down the page, and it is shorter than you think.

Two schools of thought work, and I have tried one and admired the other. I booked night by night online, often from a bench in the village centre with the next day's stage in front of me, and learnt quickly. Britt-Marie and Roy booked all 49 nights in advance and could relax during the day in a way I never quite could. Choose the school that suits your temperament. But if you want to split the Pyrenees with a night at Orisson, the room has to be secured months ahead – book in February, otherwise it is full.

My 28 nights, from hostel to casa rural, cost 1,691 euros, about 60 euros a night. It can be done cheaper in dormitories and dearer in hotels, and both are fine. If you are travelling with children or a dog: hotels rather than dormitories, for everyone's sake. And check the distance from your lodging to the nearest place to eat before you book. Seven minutes downhill on the map becomes a kilometre's climb home in the dark, on legs that have already had their say for the day.

Have low expectations of the food on the Meseta and eat properly when it is offered. Restaurants open at seven in the evening, bars may be closed in the middle of the day for cleaning, and never arrive in a town on a Monday evening, when everything is shut and you are left standing there with your hunger. Carry a packed lunch. The rewards come anyway, and they are worth the wait: pinchos on Calle Laurel in Logroño, the wine fountain at Irache, pulpo in Melide and tarta de Santiago in Galicia.

Cards work almost everywhere – except in the collection bag and with small vendors, which are precisely the places where you want to be able to pay. Carry euros in notes and small coins. And buy a coffee at the village bar even when you don't fancy one. That bar is often the village's last heartbeat, and it beats a little stronger for every pilgrim who stops.

The pilgrim passport, the credencial, you collect at the pilgrim office in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port or order from home. It is stamped every day at cafés, restaurants and churches, and after a few days the stamping becomes a small pleasure in itself – you go into a bar you didn't need and come out with a stamp and a coffee. On the last hundred and ten kilometres from Sarria, two stamps a day are required to get the compostela. The passport also gives discounts, for example two euros off the cathedral in Pamplona. As an accredited journalist I once never paid for anything. As an accredited pilgrim I got two euros. Career-wise something of a decline, but I took them gratefully.

The pilgrim office in Santiago is open 9–19, and you take a numbered ticket as at the pharmacy, which is a strangely mundane ending to 779 kilometres. Book your journey home so that you get there in time, and preferably with an extra day in Santiago. Don't go straight home – wind down. The city is worth it, and so are you.

Get a European Health Insurance Card, free from your national health authority (in Sweden, Försäkringskassan); it gives you care in Spain on the same terms as the locals. Travel cover on home insurance normally applies for 45 days – check that it covers walking, because that is not a given. If you have a chronic condition, talk to your doctor before you leave. I did, and it was one of the better conversations I had during the preparations.

Getting there: fly to Biarritz, then on by train or bus to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port – with a margin, because French trains go on strike when it suits them, not you. Charge and test your phone before departure. Mine died already at the airport, which gave the journey an unexpectedly spiritual start, long before I had asked for one.

Don't ask how far is left. Ask how far you managed today. That advice came from Håkan Södergren on the phone from Norway, and I repeated it to myself more times than I care to admit. Don't lay out the whole map on day two, or the blow lands right between the eyes – 750 kilometres to go is not an encouraging figure for anyone. Break the big goal down into daily goals and stage goals, so the head gets receipts for progress. The head wants receipts. Give it receipts.

When it is at its heaviest, and it will be: don't clean the flat, clean one room. Finish it. Move on to the next. The emergency flare when you are completely spent is to count double steps, three times up to a hundred, and I promise it sounds sillier than it is. And remember what Ulf Karlsson said: when you are completely done in, you have thirty per cent left. I have tested the theory on a long straight stretch of the Meseta. It holds.

Walk alone on the trail and socialise at the start and end of the day. You don't chatter the walk away when you walk by yourself, and two people never have the same pace – sooner or later one walks and waits for the other, and that is no basis for friendship. Seek out people who give energy; they are everywhere on the Camino. And switch off the technology. Whoever walks along talking on their mobile doesn't hear their own footsteps, and the footsteps are what you came to hear.

Expect nothing spiritual. Anyone with fixed expectations of a cathartic experience at the cathedral is often disappointed, and the meaning comes of its own accord anyway, in places where you weren't looking for it. Prepare instead for the emptiness afterwards, because it will come, and it is perfectly natural. The body has walked for four weeks and doesn't quite know what to do with a sofa. Land slowly. Wind down. And count on sitting at home in Värmland on a rainy day in November, planning the next one.