House and Garden
Errands
Kinwork and lisaism
Reading
Exercise
Before Thanksgiving
Julian Barnes. Although this is a form I usually like--the fictionalization of known persons, and in the hands of a skilled raconteur--the book ultimately left me a bit unsatisfied. Perhaps because I only found out, through the author's note at the end, that the events as well as the main characters were based in fact? Or because, since it was based on fact, I'd like to know how the one last fact was known, because it's an important thing to invent.
8 November: The book taught me two words: minatory, having an ominous or threatening appearance, and fleam, a veterinary instrument for letting blood. At least, I think the words came from this book. I wrote them on a post-it note (my bookmark of choice despite their being the bane of preservationists) that I just discovered in a crevice of my backpack.
I've gone to a few sessions of physical therapy after finally consulting a physician about my knees and the pain during and limping after running. The consensus is that I have loose joints--which is no news to me, because despite being unable to do a split since my early teens, my bendiness otherwise still surprises people--made looser because of my unorthodox postures.
Sitting like a grown-up is uncomfortable no matter how much I raise my feet. I prefer left knee up, left foot by left buttock, right leg bent and lying on the seat. Sometimes I mix it up and sit the other way except then the right leg interferes with mousing. Or tailor-style. I have stopped sitting with legs bent on the seat and feet nearly under my butt, because even years ago even I could no longer ignore how stiff and painful that left my knees.
My primary-care physician recommended a sports physiologist, who used the term "loosey-goosey" of my knees. That delighted me, a phrase I haven't heard since elementary school. She recommended physical therapy, and the PT decided that the inner fourth of my quadricep--VMO? something like that--is underdeveloped and the IT band is tight, and this, in addition to my genetically loose, pretzeled-looser knees, has led to my knees pointing not straight but to the side.
A friend in college observed in surprise that, with me seated with my legs straight in front of me, the soles of my feet bent inward at the ankle could lie flat on the floor. In one of my first yoga classes, the instructor praised my ability to lay the hand of an arm bent above my head flat on my spine. I always thought my legs' tendency to splay when I sit was due to fat on my inner thigh. I'm sure fat is part of it, but my loose knees cause it too. Loose joints, tight ligaments: middle age. Hooray.
So I have vicious exercises to do to strengthen that bit of quadricep and, in addition to stretches, an even more vicious instrument to loosen the band. I decided to buy one because I knew RDC had mentioned a tight IT band as well. I didn't know its name but at my second visit I asked for the giant column of pain. It is a 3' long column about 6" in diameter, and you plant one foot along it, perpendicular to your body, and you drag your body, on the side, up and down the rolling column, from hip to knee. Hurts like a sumbitch, that does. Also Blake's afraid of it, no surprise there.
The PT stuck biofeedback doohickeys to that muscle and had me contract it as tight as I could, and then I had to contract it for 10" on, 10" off, at 85% of the maximum, and also do leg lifts at 75% of that maximum. What's interesting to me about that is the measurement: whatever electrical impulses the device measures, my left leg can achieve only three quarters what the right can. That's how strongly dominant my right leg is, as I already knew from skiiing but now can put a figure to. I can't particularly turn at all but I am worse turning right when that leg has to unweight and let the left leg be in control.
Toward the end of freshling year of college I sprained an ankle. (My sister still gripes that I wore bluchers to her college graduation, but my foot was still too swollen to fit in dress shoes.) It was the end of school, so of course instead of studying for exams, I was playing Frisbee on dewy East Beach (gee, and I wonder why I won a spot on academic probation that semester?) and down I went. The nursing and PT majors in my hall wrapped me in an Ace bandage and sent me to the infirmary, and at the infirmary I was assigned some physical therapy.
This clinic was more used to dealing with college athletes and the male therapist clearly found my squishy freshling-15'd self beneath his dignity. He had me resist his manipulations of my ankle and was disgusted at my inability to do so; he expected I sprained my ankles often and was perhaps disappointed or disbelieving that I didn't. (But that I didn't was perhaps because I seldom did anything more strenuous than walking; the Frisbee game was procrastination, I'm sure.) He had me stand, in a doorway to catch myself, on one foot, hands at my sides, eyes closed. He was behind me and after a few minutes yelled from where he was working with a more deserving athlete that I was meant to have my eyes shut. They were, and he was as angry that I had that much micro-muscle control.
That's one thing I can still do well, and at PT I stand on a little platform whose support is a half colum and balance, front to back and then side-to-side. It's too easy on two feet eyes open and still doable on two feet eyes closed. I'm working on one foot, and of course that's my one favorite exercise, the one I can do easily already, that's probably so ankle-oriented that it does my knees and hips no good at all.
I haven't been actually exercising much but those sessions feel like a workout on their own.
Also yesterday morning I attended a flip-turn clinic at the club, and am I ever stupid at applying what I've heard to what I do. If the coach--who was excellent, supportive and encouraging and god knows long on patience--had an underwater speaker so that he could have told me what to do while I was doing it, instead of all of ten seconds before, maybe I could have got it more. I would repeat his instructions after he gave them and again as I was underwater ready to do them, to little avail. He had us splash the ceiling of the indoor pool room, two storeys overhead, to learn how much force he wanted us to apply to a turn; he told me to snap my hands from hips to over my head with as much force to achieve a flip as I use to somersault. But not to somersault, because the point is to reverse direction, a 180, not a 360. And to do all this 18" down, not shallower because of turbulence on the surface, and not deeper because of water pressure: torpedoes travel at 18" down as well, for the same reasons of efficiency. And to aspire to not breathing within the flags. Pushing off, I can get beyond the flags underwater no problem, but not to breathe within the flags on the approach to the wall? Yii. And to be able to turn well before trying to mix the turn with the push-off so you don't miscalculate and slam your ankles. Yes indeed.
He also had us guess who won the swimming medals at the 1904 London Olympics, and I guessed an Australian, based on the name of the "freestyle" stroke, the Australian crawl, but it was Mohawk Indians because they swam crawl instead of breaststroke. This makes me wonder why freestyle is called "Australian crawl" rather than the "Mohawk crawl" but perhaps their being allowed to compete was meant to be honor enough, without getting a stroke named after themselves as well.
Or not: the 1904 Games were in Missouri. Maybe he had his city wrong? Or maybe the Mohawks had the best swim time but from a bit called "Anthropology Days" rather than from the officials events in which whites only competed. Oh: Wikipedia doesn't name the event, but it was in 1844, in London, and of course breaststroking whites sneered at crawl for being "unBritish."