Horseshoes, Lucky Side Up

The fauxthotics worked! Saturday I ran four whole miles without my knee going crazy. I was even able to walk, just fine, for the rest of the day. It was great, just like old times when me and my knees would go for two-hour runs. Except this time it was more like forty minutes and it just felt like two hours.

Afterward I g-chatted a friend who is also training for a marathon. She has trained for these before. “Four miles, huh?” she remarked, unimpressed. “You have some training to do.” Yes, thank you, Marian-my-secret-twin, I do. I’d be looking forward to it if I felt confident that my knee problems were solved, but part of me remains skeptical. My PT is leaving me in two more sessions. What if the fix isn’t permanent? What if I wind up like Simon Pegg in Run Fat Boy Run, limping across the finish line?* And I wouldn’t even have a manufactured-conflict plot-driving injury to make my story more interesting. I don’t want to cross the finish line whining about my knee. I want it to be joyous and triumphant, like the Jesus thundering through the eye of the camel or however that Bible story goes that I vaguely remember from sleeping through church as a child. (Sorry, mom.)

In a word, I demand trumpets. Anyone willing to trumpet my arrival – you are NOT to blare trumpets for the rest of the pack, mind you, this is just for me, assuming you can pick me out of the other suffering marathoners – at the finish line in Central Park, drop me an email with your resume listing your trumpeting skills and let’s talk. Angel wings optional, but since the race is immediately after Halloween I’d bet you could get a wicked discount on a nice feathered set over in the West Village.

WAIT A SECOND HERE. The race is on November 1st! How did I not realize this earlier?! There goes my Halloween!

That’s it, this is an official call for musical and costumed support on race day. I’m counting on YOU to make up for the fact that I’m going to have a sucky time on my favorite holiday just so I can injure myself by running a crazy distance through the streets of the city I love. You heard me: Angel wings are no longer optional for trumpeters. Zombies, witches, and other creatures also welcome. Musical instruments welcome but optional; no experience playing them necessary.

*Spoiler alert. Shoulda mentioned that earlier, but frankly the movie wasn’t that good – it’s no Hot Fuzz for the running set.

If I walk like a duck, and I run like a duck…

Yesterday I went to my weekly physical therapy appointment. In case you’re wondering, yes, I totally look forward to these visits and am genuinely sad that there will only be two more.

Just to recap, allow me to list some of the adjectives my PT has used to describe my various biomechanical flaws:

• sway-backed
• bow-legged
• knock-kneed
• and, introducing my new favorite: butt-clencher.

The conversation went something like this:

PT:”Do a squat. No, don’t sit back in your heels like that. This isn’t the gym! Now, you see how you tend to put all of your weight into your heels?”

Me: “Uh huh.”

PT: “Now you see how you’re clenching your butt? You shouldn’t be using your glutes to stand up straight. You should be using your abdominal muscles. That means that there’s probably something funny about your feet.”

Me, brightening: “I have really short toes?”

PT, exasperated: “No. You might have short toes, but that is NOT why you put your weight in your heels.”

Me, chastened: “Oh.”

I sat on the examining table and hoped he’d pop something in my foot again that would make everything okay, but instead he rotated my ankle and pushed my foot up and demonstrated how it is not absorbing shock, shock which is being transferred to my knee, which is why it hurts when I run. Then he got out the tape and began applying it, very precisely, in great quantity. Within two minutes, my feet looked like The Mummy’s. See?

Mummy Feet

I deliberately cut my toes out of the picture because in addition to being short, they’re also really ugly right now because I haven’t had time to get a pedicure. I thought I’d spare your delicate sensibilities. Aesthetics aside, this tape design is supposed to simulate orthotics. I call them my fauxthotic horseshoes. They pull my toes down and make them touch the ground when I walk. I have to admit that these things make me feel more grounded, so to speak, but that last night I was standing at a concert (you had to pay to sit down) and they did make my feet hurt. Nonetheless, I survived and intend to see how they work with running shoes this afternoon. So far, it’s pretty neat stuff, or would be if it didn’t make me feel like I was waddling like a duck.

Someday I have to figure out whether I’m a horse or fowl. I hope this becomes clear well before the marathon, because I have a long way to go, folks.

PT and yummy mummies.

The big hazard of moving downtown has finally revealed itself. One might think that what with all the layoffs on Wall St. and related businesses, the women pilloried so joyfully in The Nanny Diaries would be a thing of the past. Not so! They are alive and well and living in the Financial District. Well, fine, you’re right: most of them probably aren’t quite in the $20 mil apartment league, but they are presumably married to people who make cartloads of money, because who else can afford all of the following accoutrements?

• luxury apartment, defined as possessing an elevator to take you to your high floor, and multiple bedrooms
• expensive haircuts – the kind that literally take ten years off your face
• expensive pets
• multiple young children
• multiple pairs of Christian Louboutin heels
• a nanny
• unemployment

Yes, I am in the universe of the yummy mummy. And although I am usually opposed to employing trendy derogatory terms for women, my stance is that if Judith Warner uses that term, so can I.

They run. They do yoga. They look like toothpicks. They wear toothpick heels. Their offspring are cute in a frightening way: matching tartan bows and dresses with patent leather shoes, eyes bigger than a Japananime heronie’s, usually shadowed or propelled through grocery stores and over sidewalks by a non-white nanny.

All of this makes me feel like a big gallumphing cow when I go out for a run. Which, given that I’m still under orders not to do anything that hurts, I’m not doing regularly. I was so disappointed that foot-popping was not in order at my last PT visit. Instead I was given exercises to do, which I’m pretty sure I’m doing incorrectly. I just wanted everything to pop into place so I could at least outrun the yummy mummies, but apparently bodies don’t work like that. Well. At least the Louboutins might be achievable someday, and I’d totally breeze by these ladies in the marathon, cause I’m a real runner. Right?

Back and badder than ever. Or not.

I know it’s been a while, and readers, I have to admit that I haven’t just been slacking off on writing. I have been slacking off (horrors!) on running as well. I know. How dare I claim to write a running blog when I’m not actually running? Rest assured, it’s only a temporary pause and I have other tidbits of ganglilicious delight for you. That is to say, my knee is still crapping out on me and probably will continue to do so for the next few weeks, but in the interim you get to read about my physical therapist.

Who, in a word, rocks my socks. Literally. As in, after I did a bunch of silly exercises that in no way contributed to my general cardiovascular health, my PT sat me on the exam table, told me to relax and raise my toe, and then popped something inside my foot. It was excruciating for about three seconds, and then it just hurt a lot, but by the time I stood up the pain was gone and I felt a little different. Nothing spectacular, just a little looser. And we practiced safe foot popping, in that I wore socks for the majority of the session. Then a young twenty-something man came in and my PT turned to him and said, with unconcealed delight, “You weren’t supposed to come back!” Apparently my PT has a devoted following among young men in tight t-shirts.  Just in case you were wondering, I highly doubt my bending at the waist was for the benefit of his checking out my ass; I expect that from his perspective it was more of an occupational hazard. I was dismissed and told I could do any exercise as long as it didn’t make my knee hurt.

I adjusted to the weirdness in an afternoon, and a couple of days later decided that my knee was feeling so much better that I would go running in my new neighborhood. (Or rather, in the adjacent park, Battery Park City, which is what was made out of all the dirt and rock that the construction of the World Trade Center produced.) I made it two miles. To be fair, I could have gone further, but had doctor’s orders to stop if it hurt, so I did. Because let’s be honest: with me, any excuse to wimp out of a run is good enough. It’s a miracle I ever got through the guaranteed entry process. It’ll be a sign that god does exist if I make it through the marathon itself, because nothing short of divine intervention and a  stubborn streak wider than the Mississippi could make me cross that finish line. The interesting thing is that when I went for my two mile run, the pain in my knee had migrated to just south of my kneecap. So whatever it was the PT did, worked. Sort of. I guess I just need more foot-popping.

If that sounds gross to you too, well, folks, you’re very perceptive. But trust me, nothing spurts. I just writhe in agony for a few minutes before my PT orders me to perform like a stringless marionette. Ha, Marion the Marionette. Not funny, folks!

And in other news, my new FiDi apartment is pretty great. It’s got an elevator. I can even see a sliver of water from my living room. Someday I might even finish unpacking the boxes.

Good news! Mixed with a little bad.

So my knee is not truly damaged! It will not prevent me from running in the marathon! Yay! Apparently I am a textbook case of IT band syndrome. I also have to issue a mea culpa to my last sports medicine doctor, who aparently knew what she was talking about. Yes, as much as I hate admitting I am wrong, she was right. Lesoon learned: just because you don’t care for X doctor’s bedside manner doesn’t make said doctor an idiot, even if you wish it did.

However, I need physical therapy and will probably endure some pain in the process. Boo. I’ll be sure to share here.

Yet, if it comes right down to it, the doctor can inject something (I think he said steroids but I think I must have heard wrong? Isn’t that illegal or something?) into my knee (this sounds horrrribly and exxxtraordinarily painful, but by golly, this is THE MARATHON and I would quite literally endure anything to get to the finish line) and I should be able to run it. On crutches. But run it I shall.

This has me so happy. More later, with lovely touristy camera shots to come, because I am leaving town tomorrow. TTFN. That’s ta ta for now, for those of us who grew up without the benefit of Pooh and Tigger.

An ode to my cranky knee.

So today I blew out my knee while running. “It doesn’t actually hurt,” I told myself as I chugged along toward mile 6. “It’s just being a whiny wimp. It doesn’t want to run today? Too bad. The weather is gorgeous and we have two more miles to go.” Right about then my knee buckled and I took a big spill and embarrassed myself in front of a bunch of tourists. At least none of them took pictures of the incident. I would have, had I not been crippled with pain.

I don’t mean to be mean to my knee. It’s just that everything in me except for my knee wanted to keep running. I love running. I even accommodated my knee by going slow. No dice. There is, quite simply, no negotiating with your knees.

Maybe I will have to become a cyborg and get a knee replacement if I want to do the marathon. This strikes me as wildly unfair. Other people’s knees carry them the full 26.2 miles; why not mine? Perhaps the sports medicine doctor will be able to let me keep my knee and make it go far enough to complete my run. The last sports medicine doctor (because of course, this has happened before, and I was not smart enough to remember that I should listen to my knee because it can always kneecap me if it doesn’t think things are going its way) I visited sucked. I mean, she knew what she was doing, but I walked in, and she told me to buy new shoes without even examining me. I told her I had had knee problems prior to buying new shoes and that the shoes I was currently running in were brand new, hardly broken in because I could not run at all, and rather than examine me she gave me a lecture on how awful shoe manufacturing was.

“I’ve seen shoes that were completely lopsided when you looked at them. They just weren’t put on the lathe right,” she bellowed. This was a rather large woman with a voice to rival a bullhorn’s. I am a rather small woman with a voice like a mouse’s, as is appropriate to my profession, so I was quite overwhelmed. Also I was sitting naked in a paper napkin of a robe, which doesn’t do much for one’s sense of authority.

“But mine are brand new,” I finally squeeked. “And they’re from Jack Rabbit Sports.”

“Doesn’t matter, get a new pair,” she demanded, and prepared to conclude the session. (Cost to health insurance for thirty seconds of this advice: upwards of $300.)

“Please take a look at my leg,” I begged. And she came over and poked one finger into my thigh and I yelped like a puppy whose tail had been stepped on. “That’s it,” she said with some satisfaction, “you have tight IT bands. Get a foam roller.” She then twisted my leg into an agony-producing position and I began to regret having demanded that she do a thorough job. “And weak hams. You need a physical therapist. Get up.”

And in my napkin-robe, she made me walk the length of the hallway, up and back, like some sort of frisky show dog except that I was feeling more like a model for some dubious fashion designer than frisky show dog. “Aha, there is something wonky about your gait!” she declared, which I sort of thought I’d mentioned PRIOR to coming into her office. She gave me a prescription for physical therapy and I went downstairs to the physical therapy office only to find out that they had openings for 11:00 am, 3:00 pm, and 4:00 pm. Like, times when most people with health insurance are usually at work earning their health insurance. Since I don’t work near enough to go on my lunch hour, I was put on a waiting list for a twice-weekly session at either 7:00 am or 6:00 pm and that was the last I ever heard from the doctor or the physical therapy outfit, apart from the email they sent me trying to get me to come in for more medical advice.

“We believe in your physical well-being. Let us help you achieve your goals,” they begged. It must be the economy that people are actually seeking real medical opinions in exchange for paying their outrageously high insurance premiums.

Needless to say, I was wildly unimpressed with this entire experience.

Tomorrow I need to set up an appointment with a different Sports Medicine doctor because the previous one is to highfalutin’ to take my current insurance. That’s fine; I’m sure there are competent doctors willing to advise me on how to make my knee last for 26.2 miles that will actually examine me first.