Walking

Since I didn’t have a lot to say concerning my progress in exercise today, I thought I would cover a subject that most people still don’t seem to know about me. Now I know that most of the people who might read this that have never met me have no reason to know it or assume it, those that do know me probably should by now. I am not exactly a quiet person that wouldn’t have shared it by now.

In all of my posts you will notice that I never talk about running, or even ever see me make it a goal to run or get to a point to run. I walk and always will, and I have accepted that as the reality of my life. I don’t think of running as a bad thing, I actually wish I could run or at least jog, but I know that I can not. Walking is good though, I enjoy a long walk and am never really in a hurry to beat any records anyway. You might be still be wondering why I can’t run though.

The simple answer to why I can’t run is that I have bad knees, but I think it is a little more complicated than that. I don’t really know the medical terms or what it is even called, it has been so long since I had a doctor look at my knees that there is no way I could remember what all those term are anymore. I can however put it in simpler terms. I was born missing this part of muscle or tendon on the inner part of each knee cap, which is a good thing that it is both of them in the same place, I do like symmetry. Over my youth, this caused my knee caps to move more freely than they should. Over time this movement caused a slow chipping, grinding and smoothing of the underside of my knee caps, until finally one of them popped out-of-place. According to my mom this first happened when I was 12, but while my knee was thrown to the side of my leg and it hurt like hell, it didn’t mean surgery and recovery and all that. No, instead it popped back in place and I went on with life.

See, I am missing that part that rips when you do that, and my knees are all nice and smooth on the bottom so there is nothing keeping them from just popping right back in place. Today I am 30 and I can just slip them on and off whenever I want at this point. Doctors have looked at them and told me all sorts of things, including medical terms for it that I have long since forgotten. The x-rays of them look really cool though, it kind of looks like my knee caps exploded. The chipped bone over my life from the smoothing of the knee caps gets stuck in the surrounding muscle and makes this interesting exploding pattern.

What does this really do in a real life situation, other than giving me a great tool for grossing people out at parties? Well, while I can slip my knees off, but they stay pretty stable otherwise, when I strain them enough, they don’t need me to decide on slipping for them, and when they go out on their own the natural reaction is a contraction of the muscle and it already hurt to go out, but that makes it hurt so much worse. Actually, the whole process of them going out causes pain and swelling, and that doesn’t even cover the damage you take in the fall or the embarrassment of when it happens in front of people. It isn’t really that I can’t run either, this is where it gets hard to explain to me. My knees can, and have, gone out while just walking, especially if I slip on something. The incident of it happening is really just higher when I run. The knee just has more ability to shift when under the pressure of running and it makes it more likely for it to happen.

It is possible that I will run at some point, if not just short runs or light jogging. I do exercises to keep my leg muscles up to reduce times the knees pop out on a normal bases as well as to help with pain that they cause, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that I might be able to also get to a point to jog or even run, but I think it is also a factor of if I feel comfortable trying it as well. There is a way to fix this issue completely, two doctors have recommended it so far, but there isn’t much about knee replacement surgery that sounds like something I want to do, well ever. As long as my knees work and I can at least walk, I don’t see a need in “fixing” them.