You heard the man, he only breaks noses, and cartilage doesn't count. Totally peaceful.
I've never broken a toe before. Should I try it?
My little toes are the only bones I have ever broken. One per foot.
And that was the longest 8 foot dash you've ever ran.
I've broken a finger. Now I flip the bird with an accent.
On the foot-pain front, I'm irked. Two weeks ago last Friday, running in my thrilling new barefoot shoes, my foot started hurting (the ball of the foot, behind the fourth toe --pinky-side of the foot, but not all the way over). This morning, I tried running again in normal shoes, made it a mile and had to quit.
Feh. I hate stationary bikes, but I hate them slightly less than ellipticals, and that's all they've got at my gym. And I have no idea how long I'll be off this thing.
You could ride your regular bike.
But then, I could also ride my regular bike as opposed to focusing on the "pie and eggnog" diet, so don't listen to me.
Commuting on my regular bike is out because the days are too short, and I don't really have the time for it otherwise.
You can still break your toe swimming. You need to watch where you kick.
18: You can also snap your hips while swimming.
I'm guessing on that. Lots of islands around there, so if she doesn't she could.
Am I going to want to skip this thread because it's all about injuries?
I braved it! The thread is fine.
I broke my promise, once. It didn't hurt me much.
Continued narcissistic toe-blogging: I'm still suffering limitations on movement, as demonstrated just now when I trotted down to a café only to come limping back. Running is definitely out for several days, which makes me grumpy.
Oooh! I'm down with an exercise thread - I played soccer for the first time yesterday. It went much better than my first time back after Hawaiian Punch. At the end my hip flexors and groin muscles were in agony but I'm actually not particularly sore today. But it felt so good to be back in the saddle.
I found that the physical bounceback was much faster after my second kid than my first -- I don't know if that's a general rule, but it was certainly my impression.
Recovery has gone much better this time.
For the record, given how wildly variable labor and delivery is, I think it's idiotic how it's rigidly prescribed that you should wait 6-8 weeks before doing anything. Probably many women are just as glad to be told that they shouldn't demand too much of themselves too early, so maybe that's the charitable explanation. But strictly medically, I'm pretty sure it's nonsense that you need to wait, if you otherwise feel fine. I've heard "Your uterus isn't back to it's normal size yet" as justification, and also "Your organs need to move back into position."
I would have to guess that the organs move back pretty quickly. They are mostly sacks of gelatinous goop, afterall. Ah, the joy of sacks.
27, 29: You are, by the way, awesome. Easier bouncing back your second time or not, playing soccer with a baby who's what, five weeks? is hard core.
Yeah, that one seems particularly nonsensical. Also it came from a somewhat hocus-pocus based source.
Why, thank you! A lot of it is just a willingness to look slow and lumbering out there.
The obvious advice for how soon to do something after having a baby is just to listen to your body. But a lot of people don't speak that language, it seems.
33: Yeah, plus it's hard to get a good foot on a five-week old.
34: To be fair, my body only speaks hungarian and I've never learned it.
Your organs need to move back into position
Isn't this something that a person can tell for themselves is happening or not? I mean, I'll never know what it feels like to have a baby, but I have had a hernia and I knew that one of my sacks of goop wasn't in the right place. So why wait if you feel okay?
I saw a pair of LB's toe shoes that were constructed to look like white-person-colored feet wearing Teva sandals. Then I had a stroke and died, and now communicate to you through a medium.
Wow, that sounds heinously ugly.
White people may have ugly feet, but we have a rich culture.
Does anyone have a good internet source for diagnosing what foot pain means? I don't have a lot of experience with injuries, and while this thing in my foot doesn't hurt enough that it's making me unhappy, it's been uncomfortable for two weeks now, and in a way that feels unfamiliar. I'm wondering how I'd know if it were a stress fracture, and whether there'd be anything sensible to do other than not running on it untill it completely stops hurting.
41: My brother stress fractured his foot by running and it caused all kinds of problems. I think the pain hit him fairly hard right from the start. Anyway, I find this a bit amusing because he's 30 pounds lighter and my feet having broken yet.
41: I've had a lot of luck just Googling. I have diagnosed you with capsulitis.
43: On googling capsulitis, it's possible, but I don't think so -- they keep on talking about feeling like you're stepping on something hard. This pain is internal to the foot, and not strongly responsive to impact or poking it (running this morning made it worse, but not like each step was particularly painful).
I recommend bleeding and leeches.
Don't listen to 45. He's not a doctor like I am.
46: Feh. Sites talking about stress fracture say six to eight weeks. And running was going so nicely for once -- I was really managing to go pretty fast by my standards.
Oh well. Stupid exercise bike.
Come to think, maybe I'll start doing weights again. I can't do squats with a bad foot, but everything else should be good.
49: CA occasionally gets something similar to what you describe from biking and, based on xrays and MRIs, isn't a fracture, but some kind of repetitive stress something that has never been named and anti-inflammatories have been the only cure. So it really may not be a fracture.
Oh well. Stupid exercise bike
Weather.com suggests you could bike reasonably comfortably to work all week long, except maybe Friday. Oh, wait. There's a headlight issue, now that I'm recalling. Never mind! (This was an unhelpful comment.)
Right, it's not weather, it's dark. I could power through the dark, but I really don't want to.
49: Is it present when you're exercising wearing non-finger-toed shoes?
I attached the awesomest new light mount to my bike last week, more than doubling my forward lighting capacity; you could do that! I realize it doesn't fix the "blinded by drivers" thing, but maybe you could blind them back.
maybe you could blind them back.
Flash them with your titles (hooray!).
You could leave work at 4:30 until March.
You could carry a pocketful of pebbles and work on your aim. Do those people really need headlights in a reasonably well-lit urban environment? I mean, really.
53: Yep. It's been sore for two weeks -- worse immediately after the initial injury, but continuously -- and got worse again this morning trying to run in real shoes. I haven't worn the gorilla feet shoes at all.
Drat. I was really liking the gorilla feet.
worse immediately after the initial injury, but continuously
I must have missed earlier discussion - I didn't realize there was a moment of injury. That makes it sound less like a stress fracture. Maybe just a regular fracture!
Well, it started hurting while I was running on it. Not terribly badly -- I finished another couple of miles thinking "Should I stop? It doesn't hurt that badly. Maybe I should stop. Eh, if it were a real problem it would hurt enough that I wouldn't be wondering if I should stop. But maybe I should stop anyway," and while I was dithering, I finished running as far as I'd been planning to. So, not a moment of injury -- no instant when I yelped with pain -- but a clearly identifiable five-ten minute period before which my foot was fine, and after which it wasn't.
(And, narcissist that I am, thank you all for focusing on my irritating foot problems.)
Try wearing a hair shirt instead of stones in your shoes. Your feet should then heal quickly.
The hair shirt gets all tangled up in my bed of nails.
I recommend bleeding and leeches
You rang?
My toe, too, is unbroken. Also my knee. X-raying knees is much more complicated than I would have thought. And X-raying toes requires taping the others out of the way.
Still, after all this application of technology, I'm to keep taping my toe to the neighbouring toe for the next two to three weeks, just as if I'd broken it. So I'll have to wear regular sneakers to work out, instead of my Vibrams.
but I hate them slightly less than ellipticals
After I tore my ACL a few years back, I learned to put aside my natural loathing for the e-machines and now prefer them to the bikes. My butt certainly does anyway.
All this talk of Vibram Five-Toe shoes (or whatever exactly they're called) reminds me that I recently read in a waiting room an article on Cross-Fit and the Paleo Diet.
I thought of Halford. Let's see, the article is here, in Outside magazine. It's not quite Cross-Fit, but "MovNat", or Move Naturally. I read only half the article, but I must say it was diverting. Lots of manliness! In the magazine as a whole.
Toward the end of the half I read, a participant in the program was begging for bananas, because he was experiencing a sugar crash. I never did find out if they let him have a banana.
More seriously, it sounded like the military's basic training.
I never did find out if they let him have a banana.
Curious George books never leave you hanging on that point.
Take care of your feet, everybody.
My favorite foot exercise was always the "trace the entire alphabet with your toes" one because you could do it under your desk at school. You're supposed to push all the way through your ankle and arch, by the way.
I also recommend regularly standing barefoot and spreading your toes way out and strumming them, as though you were strumming your fingers on a desk. It can help to make the same motion with your hands at the same time.
Also, most of your shoes are probably bad for you. (Probably! Not definitely!)
Anyway, to this day, I can pinch you with my toes hard enough to bruise. My feet and ankles also crack like a nightingale floor, so there's a possible downside.
You're supposed to push all the way through your ankle and arch, by the way.
In the tracing of the alphabet? Meaning, use your whole foot in the tracing (so, like, your heel is not on the floor)?
I like it, just checking for understanding.
Your foot should definitely be off the floor. Maybe crossed over the other foot.
Another strengthening exercise is sort of a centipede-like motion. You do it standing, and starting out, you'll probably keep most of your weight on your inactive foot. You stretch out your toes forward, then contract your instep to inch your heel forward, then relax. And repeat. It's tougher than it sounds.
Then there are the endless going-up-on-the-balls-of-the-feet-and-slowly-coming-back-down exercises, of which there are more variations than you might imagine.
Feet are important.
I'm glad that Parsi thinks that I am all man. No one knows you're a dog on the internet! Anyhow, less extreme versions of MovNat are awesome but pretty much the thing I'm worst at. Parkour is pretty badass.
These foot exercises are great, Jackmormon. Thanks.
I'm glad that Parsi thinks that I am all man.
I was thinking of some of the photo spreads in the magazine (some of these young hotshots are hot!). Still, what you're doing sounds tremendous, and I laud you. I'm not sure why you say you're worst at this: you're doing Cross-Fit or something like it, right?
66, 68: Yeah, you know. As in, "I got to(r)e up"?
I'm actually finishing reading the article linked in 67. On the last page, I read:
Le Corre throws in some mind games, telling us we're doing an exercise on a ten count but stopping at eight and then counting backwards or repeating a number over and over: "Seven, seven, seven, seven ..."
My physical therapist used to do this to me. Ha, ha, funny guy.
77: My mom used to do something like that to me to get me to finish dinner. "Ten more bites." [ten bites] "Okay, nine more bites." [hey, wait a second here]
Didn't you want to grow-up big and strong like William Perry.