physical therapy and stuff

A few weeks ago my husband, who is suffering from tendonitis in his achilles, went to have his feet scanned and better insoles found and stuff, and thought it was interesting enough that I should do the same. Especially because I have stupidly wide feet, although as it turns out, they’re apparently only wide, not STUPIDLY wide. That’s something, I guess? Except they remain too wide for most women’s shoes, so, y’know, oh well.

Anyway, so I went in and did this thing and it was in fact interesting. I, uh, overpronate slightly on my left foot (which means it rolls in a bit too much) and underpronate slightly on my right foot (which means it rolls out a bit too much). I suspect the latter is due to having stepped on the dog’s bone very, very hard a couple of years ago and having only extremely recently having fully healed from that. Knock on wood. So on my list of things to do now is exercises to correct my various pronation issues, because I’ve been SO GREAT at exercising in general, right? Right. Feh.

More interesting, though, was that apparently I put like ALL my weight on my heels when I’m standing, so now I have fancy insoles that help to keep me from doing that. I’ve had them about a week now and they’re starting to not hurt my feet as much, and I’m certainly more conscious about where I’m holding my weight, which is the idea. But because I stand on my heels so hard, I guess, she was like, “You get shin splints, yeah?”

Me: uh, no, basically never

her: like when?

me: like…maybe if i’ve walked A LOT?

her: what’s ‘a lot’?

me: IDK, 10+KM? (altho tbh i’ve done 15 & 17km days in the past week and no, i just don’t get shin splints.)

her: oh ok yeah no

But while she was bending my feet around to examine them, she also said, “You have REALLY flexible feet!” Which, IDK, I sort of assume that’s from dancing in my callow youth, but whatever the reason, apparently it’s genuinely pretty unusual.

And it reminded me that my PT has commented any number of times on the fact that regardless of what other issues I’m having, I have “great feet!” I guess people’s feet aren’t bendy? Or they get tense? IDK, who knew? But she’s always like “ok let’s look at your feet…oh, ok, moving on.” So I guess I’ve learned something about my anatomy compared to most peoples’. :)

I also took a REALLY LONG DAY to go see said PT, who lives on the other side of the country, but I love her very much and she really gives me a good workover, so for a birthday present to myself I, uh, got up at 4:30am, rode a train for 9 hours, spent 90 minutes getting worked over, and got home in the middle of the night.

On one hand, you’d think I have TERRIBLE ideas about what to do as a birthday treat for myself, but on the other, my GOD it was worth it. It was so worth it that despite 9 hours on trains I still actually felt great when I got home.

Despite having not seen her in almost a year, I was apparently in pretty good nick. Certainly the bits I was most anticipating being extremely terrible were not all that bad, which I attribute to the exceptionally pathetic attempts at stretching I’ve been indulging in the past couple of months. I mean, at least I’ve done something, apparently.

I do need to find a yoga class, though, because one of the problems with being responsible for my own stretching is I get bored really fast, so I don’t do as much as I should. Although in my defense, I signed up for a local yoga studio’s newsletter MONTHS ago in hopes of being told when the next classes start, but apparently they don’t use it. I’ve just found their stupid facebook page, though, so I’ll follow that and try to get in on the next round.

So anyway, for the moment, not feeling entirely terrible about myself, which is kinda nice. :)