Bikes &Body &Garden 28 Jan 2007 03:31 pm
Life roundup
I’ve been busy with physical therapy lately. It’s about what you’d expect from me: weak VMO, internally rotated femurs, sub-optimal hip muscles… if I’d realized how much of the body’s well-being comes down to the muscles of the butt, I would have been a lot more careful after being tossed through the air by a van and smacking my derriere on the pavement a few years ago. (“You’ll be fine in eight weeks,” indeed.) Fortunately, I don’t seem to have done myself a whole lot of real damage — no torn ACL or anything.
It’s been sort of fun working on the VMO part of all this — I get to run a small electric current through the VMO while flexing it. It feels like I’m ripping Scotch tape off the skin there. Dan the PT also has got me doing little tiny interval training: I boost my heart rate to about 135 for thirty seconds or so, then cool back down to below 110 for a minute, and repeat.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with oddball resist-dyeing methods. So far, my experiments have not been particularly successful.
Yesterday, Josh and I dropped by the open house at Two Cranes Aikido, which has moved to my neck of the woods. We’re thinking about giving it a try, starting probably in April.
A minor rite of passage: I had my first bike wipeout on January 13. Out on the tandem a block and a half from home, we hit a patch of ice and went down. My thought on the way down: “Oh, man, I really don’t want to have to tell the physical therapist about this.” Because, really, being out on that road that day was plain crazy. But I’m glad to have the first wipeout over with. I’d been fairly afraid of falling on the bike, especially since it’s a tandem—I’d imagined the combined force of bike, pavement, and captain all working together to snap my femur. But no, I just jarred a few joints.
I placed a super order at Raintree Nursery a few weeks ago during their winter sale. Arriving in the mail at some point are two kinds of strawberries, three kinds of lingonberries, two kinds of thornless blackberries, two kinds of blackcurrants, and a Stevens cranberry. (Oh boy oh boy oh boy….) I’ve gone plant-mad. I want to rip up the parking strip and plant it with raspberries. I want to train apple trees on wires into a living fence in the front yard. I want a greenhouse. Yeah, it’s January, all right.
on 28 Jan 2007 at 4:17 pm 1.Amy said …
I’d say at least half hte patients I see have weak hip muscles. (Of course, the reason they are coming to PT is because they are having problems. So this should not be construed to mean that half the population has weak hip muscles.)
And if you have internally rotated femurs, just working on the hip muscles to get your legs in a better position will probably greatly help patellar tracking, even without working on the VMO. (VMO strengthening is highly controversial in the PT world. Some people believe it is completely necessary, others thing that poor patellar tracking is almost always due to other problems such as poor alignment.) It sounds like you have a good PT program that will help regardless of where the problem stemmed from!
on 28 Jan 2007 at 7:54 pm 2.Joy said …
Strange celebrity coincidence: I was watching Jay Leno earlier this week (insomnia) and Rebecca Romijn was a guest (aka Romijn-Stamos, but since she’s with Jerry O’Connell these days I’m not surprised at the truncation). Much was made of this photo of the two of them on a tandem bike. I’d noticed she had a bandage on one knee – and as it turns out, she revealed that about 5 minutes after that snapshot, they took a spill when he made a turn she didn’t anticipate. She was quite the advocate for tandem biking. See what you and Josh started? *grin*
on 28 Jan 2007 at 7:55 pm 3.Joy said …
Whoops – I meant started the trend of tandem biking, not started the trend of wiping out whilst doing so. I are writer good, yup.