walking

[hnpcc]

Last night I went back to the physio. And discovered that I have no idea how to walk.

Basically what I was doing wrong was lifting my heel and moving my weight onto the ball of my foot before my good foot was on the ground. This is apparently not how you walk.

So all day I've been carefully putting my heel down, locking my knee (to stop myself moving automatically onto the front of my foot) moving my other foot, and then starting to lift my heel to move forward again. It's more complicated than it sounds.

The reason I was doing it wrongly was, of course, that it still hurts around my ankle, and my tendon is still stiff. But I've done lots of calf stretches now, so it's less stiff. Just painful, although the more I do it the less it hurts. Until I sit down for longer than half an hour, whereupon it "sets" and I have to ease into the motion again.

Also because, quite seriously, I didn't notice that that's not how I walk. For the first time since I was about 18 months old I'm thinking quite a lot about walking. And how you do it. And watching other people doing it to see what they do. And wondering if that's what I'm doing or not (it's difficult to tell).

I watched the "Baby It's You" documentary last night, which was all about how we learn to walk. And totally empathised with the babies trying to (a) stand up, (b) work out how to get one foot in front of the other and especially (c) standing at the top of a flight of stairs trying to work out how on earth you get down that! It does make me wonder how the hell I learnt to do this in the first place, let alone why I can't work out how to do it properly - or what properly is - now. I think I've lost some brain cells in the intervening years.

Still. Off crutches next week. I keep saying it, so it must be true.

Comments

[davesangel.livejournal.com]

I remember in a Drama practical in first year, we had to carefully watch everyone else in the room walking, look at how they did it, and then try to copy a particular person's style. It was actually very difficult and we all wondered if we had actually been walking properly at all (cos everyone's style varied so much), I think everyone just assumes that they can walk and that's it. But it's not so simple, so I know what you mean about how strange it is.