walking!

[xela]

I just went outside and walked 3/4 mile. Not much to you, probably, but the most I've walked without either using a cane or sitting down to rest since my stroke, and the most in any form since I got that damned persistent plantar fasciitis just over a year ago. And my foot doesn't hurt!

I didn't mean to take that long a walk. I'd just finished watching a netflix DVD that I'd started a couple of days ago: episodes 4-6 of the 2005 Doctor Who series, which I'm honestly far more enthusiastic about than I ever was about classic Doctor Who, even Tom Baker. My foot hasn't bothered me for a couple of weeks, but I've had so many false starts with thinking "ok, this time the treatment worked" that I'd been reluctant to actually try walking. But there I was, thinking 'the sooner I mail this one back, the sooner I'll get the next
three episodes ... and I have to try walking more than fifty feet sooner or later ... and the mailbox is what, 150 yards, 200 at most...." Which it might have been if I hadn't been spacing a bit, enjoying the crisp night air (-4 C) and walking an unfamiliar route with way more side streets than the way I go when I'm driving, one of which I accidentally headed up.

When I started this I was still on the endorphin rush; it's passing but I'm still feeling as good as I've felt in ages. Here's hoping this is real, and I don't wake up in pain.

Comments

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Good for you!

[eccentrific.livejournal.com]

Woo! That's great!
Here's hoping your walking continues to go well.

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

Hope you didn't end up too achy afterward. (I'm guessing you probably did ache, but hopefully in a nice way - the way of muscles waking up after an enforced slumber.)

What's it like round where you live? I've always found it easier to walk when I've had agreeable locations close to my house, being able to cut through a park or a leafy suburb on the way to work or popping to the shops. The sound of birdsong, which you tend to miss when you're in a car.

It sounds a bit cold and bleak where you are... not conducive to strolling!

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Love the new userpic.

I had sort of a shadow of the severe pain in my foot that's kept me off it for so long the day after that walk, which got me a little discouraged but seems to have passed. Right now I have to strike a delicate balance to exercise enough to do myself some good but avoid re-injuring that. I've tried not to complain about it, but it's been an albatross around my neck. I hurt myself in the first place by overdoing it six months out from the stroke, and if I do it again and find myself looking at another six months of enforced immobility.... I think I'd lose it.

I live in what's considered a happening neighborhood, Davis Square. (Named "squares" in the Boston area are anything but. The street layouts here are the product of scattered farms and villages transmorgifying over 300 years into a giant city, and a "square" is where a bunch of roads the settlers carved out of the forest 300 years ago converged.) Davis has a few bars with live music and the Somerville Theater, a 1920s cinema that seats about 1000 and occasionally has live concerts. Lots of restaurants, lots of coffeehouses, a really good used bookstore, and lots of people on the streets til fairly late into the night. Two blocks away it's all quiet residential — 1890s Victorians,"three-deckers" (three identical apartments stacked one on top of the other, with shared laundry and storage in the basement), three of four story 1920s brick apartment buildings with 10 or 20 units. Where I live, at the top of a little hill five blocks away, it's mostly Victorians, most of which were divided into apartments 50 years or so ago, when Americans got collectively stupid and moved to the suburbs to worship at the shrine of the automobile; some are being renovated back to their original glory now. There a lot of trees along the streets, which right now are stark collections of grey branches against a grey sky, but I look forward to seeing what they do in the spring. No proper parks nearby, save one patch of grass right up against a very busy roundabout. But I'm new to this neighborhood, so for at least the next several months the architecture and the trees should make walking around it interesting.

Bleak is probably too strong a word. (I once lived essentially under the approaches to a very busy 12-lane highway bridge — the view out my window was dominated by concrete beams and columns. That was bleak.) And while it has been cold lately, I've been through winters in Minnesota, where the average high temperature in February is -2C. And I have a good heavy coat. I didn't write about it, but one of the things I really liked about the walk the other night was the quality of the sound. I only saw maybe a half-dozen other people — but I heard them all from a block or more away: the scuff of a shoe on the sidewalk, the scratch of jeans legs against each-another, the swish of arms swinging in a heavy parka, the whisper of a bicycle tire on asphalt. You only get that when the air is cold and clear and still, and it's worth having to bundle up for.