Hip check: physical therapy reveals personal shortcomings

Caution: non-birding post ahead 🟡

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Some of you may know that when I’m not birding, working, filming, or stuck in traffic on the Kennedy, that I am running.¹ Or I was running, until the middle of last summer. That was when my foot seized up like a knotted pretzel and left me hobbling for about a week. It happened halfway out on a 5-mile run and I had to limp home with a mix of pain and shame and embarrassment. It was nine good years of running before this episode.

People who know me really well—certainly my teammates on the 10th-grade basketball team—know that I’m not a natural runner or even a jogger for that matter. Far from it in fact. To even now say that I’ve run a couple of 10Ks and a half-marathon feels like an anomaly. However, I felt like I made progress through the years and made up for a plodding gait with persistence.

Birders aren’t natural runners either. Birding, after all, is a pursuit that requires no athletic skill at all.² In fact, oftentimes, the goal is to avoid walking or moving around too much, say a few feet from an overlook or a car stakeout. A rare bird that isn’t directly adjacent to a parking lot or roadway may as well be in the Aleutian Islands.

So all of this leads to that incident 11 months ago. I saw the doctor soon after and got a prescription. A few weeks later I lumbered into a location of a local kinesiology shop. I didn’t know what to expect, other than an assessment of my condition. I viewed all the therabands, machines, and weights with suspicion. What would the remedy for my aching foot be? The rack, the stocks, the chair? I thought about Mr. Miyagi rubbing Daniel’s ankle at the All Valley Karate Championship, hoping against hope that my foot may be so easily cured.

I lay back on one of the treatment tables and braced for being evaluated. I knew I wasn’t in great shape—hence the visit to the clinic—but I didn’t expect the first of a few surprising discoveries and pronouncements. First, my left leg is apparently longer than my right leg. This came as a surprise. I also felt a bit helpless. If this had something to do with getting better, it seemed well out of my control. My left leg will probably always be longer than my right leg.

Then I was asked to lay on my side and stretch my leg into the air. The therapist leaned on the leg, which collapsed in a heap. “Your hips are weak,” was the verdict, stated in a Palpatine hiss. Again, I hadn’t ever thought about the relative strength of my hips or even how to strengthen them. Visions of Elvis, Shakira, and Travolta came to mind. I’m aware of most of my shortcomings, and my adductors and flexors weren’t among them.

Next I was asked to walk down a small flight of stairs that were set up for testing out new patients. I walked down the three stairs confidently. This was a test I knew I could pass. “Your feet are at an angle,” the clinician said flatly. I thought back to all the times I went down a set of stairs in recent weeks. Maybe I had been taking them more gingerly. The peculiarities of my lifestyle were adding up.

The bigger question to me was what all these things had to do with the knotted tendon in my foot. I still left thinking that this would be a few sessions of therapy and that I’d be back on the running trail in no time. That didn’t turn out to be the case. I went through myriad PT sessions and exercises at home that finally got the whole of my right leg—hips, knee, ankle, and foot—in shape.

Four months later, on my last day of therapy, I was ready to sail out the door and treat myself to two scoops of ice cream. My speed on the treadmill was increasing and so was my stamina. I could now land on my foot over and over without needing a sedative. I was thinking the therapist would be impressed with my progress over these many months. “What other stretches can I do?” was my question after a lengthy run. “Hip stretches. They’re still weak.”

1. My last post about running was more than three years ago “This Isn’t California” - !

2. This raises the question of whether birding is a sport, despite Sports Illustrated’s best attempts at covering it.