Achilles tendons are dicks.

No seriously.

They are not nice and friendly tendons, they are fakers.

Hanging out, on the back of your feet, quietly doing their jobs until – out of nowhere – they decide to… you know… burst out of anonymity and make the point that they are necessary.

Often when you are just minding your own business, doing absolutely nothing to aggravate them.

Sigh.

Fine.

Maybe you are doing something to aggravate them.

But if the thing you are doing is just making a point that your fifty year old body can totally keep up with your wHippersnapper 23 and 24-year-old kid and kid and a half at the gym that you have been going to for months and they are just going to because they are visiting you for the week between Christmas and New Years…

Which, by the way, it totally did – my fifty year old body – because I absolutely ruled in the medicine ball slamming part of the competition… I mean workout.

Anyway…

All I did was a teeny bit of running and, as I explained in a past post, I now have a prescription that I can no longer run (which is the best prescription ever issued on this planet (and I have chosen to listen to it even though it was initially issued by a doc who treats the Baltimore Ravens).

So it turns out that when you decide to push your complaining ‘we-don’t-wanna-run’ Achilles tendons too far they get totally pissy and martyr-y and, in fits of ‘look at me! look at me!” shred themselves!

And then you have to wait for these tears to heal and you get to do bo-bo exercises* like ‘calf raises using both feet’ and then ‘calf raises using one foot’.  Any of which I could have just banged out without thinking – no problem – before Mac and Jack pushed me over my limit at the gym (totally their fault).  There are also other exercises, like bingeing on HGTV (and Fixer Upper in particular).

So walking has been painful, and also stair climbing and general ambulation.  So I do what I can and allow these lazy-assed Achilles to rest, and get all pissy in my head and then remind myself that people deal with chronic pain all the time and I am getting better so what do I have to be pissy about other than Sam off’ing me should the zombie apocalypse happen because I can no longer run (and the fact that I can run sideways and also skip doesn’t matter to him and he says I am still a liability (ungrateful pisser)).

But yesterday was the day.

I was taking a walk.

Outside.

And not just to my car, and then to the supermarket or back and forth to a rest stop ladies room or my house or other short jaunts.

I was going to see my cows up the street and that was that and shut up JoHn because I am doing it!

And I did.

And I am telling you, it was awesome.

Sure, it was slow, and I had to focus on my form (seriously humbling to have to focus on my form, to walk) but it really felt great to just do.

It was probably only the better part of a mile, and I visited ‘my’ cows (and also a brand new neighbor, a horse named ‘Jazz’) on my route.

I have actually had very few medical things I could not bully my way through in my life.  Seriously. I’m ridiculous and I know it. From emergency c-sections to emergency spinal surgery (go big or go home) to broken bones to … well, whatever… I’m of the school of ‘just muscle my way past the pain because it’s not really there’ (also known as being a graduate of DU (Denial University). But I was lucky, in that my approach always worked for me (barring an infection or two, and the occasional annoying chastisement from members of the medical community).

So this one has thrown me a little. I actually do have to go slow, and allow things to fix themselves, and tough boogers if I don’t like it because I just have to deal with it.

So what if I had a hiccup on the road to getting my sexy back?

At least my body told me to pull up before I actually ruptured both Achilles’ right?

Maybe there is something to this pain thing, like it’s an early warning sign or something, and I should listen to it more… especially as I enter the second half of my life and maybe things will take longer to heal now and I should be more conscious and mature about what I do with this body.  Maybe I should think more before I ….

HA!

Did you see how many ‘shoulds’ were in that run-on sentence?

I just oppositional reflexed myself right out of that line of reasoning right then!

I’ll be all careful as I get back into the swing of things, and do all the right stretchy massage-y things I’m supposed to do.  But my take away?

My take away is that I was forced to slow down enough to look forward to enjoying a slow walk, on a beautiful day that had early spring undertones in the air, and the light, and the breezes.

Also, as long as I avoid the shuttle runs, I think I can still kick Mac’s and Jack’s arses the next time we go to the gym…

Thanks for readin’.

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*In Dingleville, ‘bobo’ is means simple or easy.  I first heard it said by Mac’s college roommate Vanessa – an excellent writer who slept through her college english placement exam thus landing her in ‘bobo english’. This term was immediately, and of course-ed-ly co-opted by us for everything.  Bobo math, bobo driving skool, and – my all time fave, coined by Jack for the Campus Police? “bobo po-po”.