roguedemon

As for what I did with my 20 mile walk:

1. I saw a group of 3 deer very close up in the forest!

2. I gave a dog belly rubs. I went to pet it, and it immediately rolled over on its back and started begging for belly rubs. Friendliest dog ever! <3333

3. I went to the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East.

4. I finally got that Persian ice cream all the way over in Watertown! The cardamom was the best, omggg. The place in Westwood that I like and will be moving far too close to :P doesn't have cardamom. Possibly for the best that the only cardamom ice cream is 10 miles from me and I'm injured, but omg, that was so good.

5. A number of American Revolutionary War plaques, signs, and memorials passed on the way. It was my first time walking through Arlington, and yep, they love their plaques. Oh, on the way from the museum to the ice cream, I was made to understand via multiple markers that I was traveling along the route that General Knox took when bringing the artillery from Ticonderoga, New York, to deliver to George Washington in Boston in the winter of 1775-1776, which was instrumental in driving the British out of Boston. (I don't actually know my Revolutionary War history very well; all my eighteenth century history studies have been European.)

The plan yesterday was to walk out to Watertown and get some Persian ice cream. I've had my eye on this place since the pandemic. It's a little under 10 miles, and judging by my previous 15-mile walk (the one before I ended up crippled for 2 days), I should have been able to make it there and back.

Well, fitness is one thing, injury is another. I woke up with my knee sending alarm signals--I think it didn't like the new mattress I was trying out. So I had to stop and rest it every 10 minutes or so, and after a couple hours it got better, but only at the expense of non-stop hamstring pain (bad pain, from compensating). So I had to rest more and more frequently.

By Cambridge it was clear I wasn't going to make it to Watertown. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that constantly pulling my phone out to check the map gives me back pain, so I wasn't doing that nearly as often as I should have (considering I was walking through a dense area with many twists and turns on an unfamiliar route), and three separate times I realized I had turned left when I meant right or vice versa, and now I needed to turn around and retrace my steps. That probably cost me close to 3 extra miles.

At that point, I decided to enjoy the Harvard Musem of Natural History. And then I knew I should take public transit back. But my brain was yelling, "I don't wanna!"

So I set off in the general direction of Watertown, knowing I wasn't going to make it 3.5 miles, but figuring I could at least enjoy Mount Auburn Cemetery, only 1.5 miles away.

Turns out the thing I wanted to see most (Nathaniel Bowditch's grave) was .5 miles from the entrance, so that added a full mile. And then I realized there was no making it back to Harvard (1.5 miles), much less to Persian ice cream (2 miles). So rather than take a bus followed by a subway followed by another subway followed by another bus, which would take about 2 hours if everything was on time, I just took a Lyft home. Ugh.

Total walking was about 13 miles, but with absurd amounts of resting and walking slowly. I even got passed by people! Even dog-walking people!

Considering that the only thing I did wrong to fuck up my knees is sleep, and considering their pain levels seem to correlate closely with how I sleep*, I guess my focus needs to be on figuring out the mattress situation.

* They have bizarrely switched from "if I am injured, do not lie on me" to "if I am injured, you must lie on me," which, okay, I'm just trying to keep up here, but you're the boss.

Oh, I'm sure various of my readers are asking, "But, Mildred, why are you not seeing a physical therapist?" and the answer is that during my year of medical leave from work in 2019, when I made getting professional help for my various pains (back, foot, sciatica) a full-time job, none of the many GPs, specialists, PTs, non-traditional practitioners, etc., ever managed to accomplish a single thing for me. Several made it worse. So I have largely given up on the medical establishment + me as a good combination. (When I saw a highly recommended sports medicine doctor about my foot last year, she was all, "It's a mystery!" Yes, I am a mystery. I am a walking mystery.)

The only thing any of my pains have responded to is sleep posture, and occasionally (if I'm lucky) a stretch, so at this point all my energy goes toward sleep posture. I'm still convinced that if I could just sleep with my shoulders aligned, my back pain would get way better, and that's what the latest mattress experiment was all about. I'm still working on that, but I had originally set it up so that I would sleep on my right side, because that's what my more injured left knee wanted--but now my left knee apparently wants me to sleep on my left side (???) so I've got to put in the work to make the mattress so I can sleep on my left side (it's complicated).

Maybe one day I will have a functional body again. I have given up on running for the time being, I think it's just a really bad idea to keep trying. I hope I haven't reached the point where walking is a really bad idea, but I fear I may be there.