Airline Syndrome

It’s like waiting for my company (or anyone else’s, I’m sure) to get new products out the door. Sorry, we’ve pushed that date another 3 weeks. And then another 2 weeks. And then… Call it the airline syndrome. We’ll be underway in only 30 minutes, at which point we’ll tell you 15 more. And so it goes with the recovery. My foot, that is. I’m not making any predictions on the economy.

Time flies when you’re having fun, and sometimes it just flies. Today marks four full months since my last run, logged on the 24th of October, 2008. It’s been so long I feel the need to add, “A-D”. But tomorrow I see Dr. Foot Doctor, who already said via email that he’s ready to clear me to return to the streets – taking it easy of course. With that email, my heart leapt like bad Shakespearean prose on a stormy summer night. No, I don’t really know what that means.

And, he added, it’s time to get aggressive on the rehab and do some physical therapy to get those crusty joints moving again. Recall he’d held off on that till now, taking the conservative approach to assure tendon healing, an approach that I agreed with then and still do. And so off I trundled this fine windy morn to embark on this next chapter of the adventure.

I’ve never done PT before and wasn’t quite sure what to expect, especially when we’re dealing with such a small bit of bodily mechanics. Indeed, my friendly physical therapist, who we’ll call Lady Healer on her request, and not Ms. Physical Terrorist, as her colleague suggested (a colleague who, I was told, was quite jealous of Lady Healer’s new patient assignment as she is apparently smitten with a fetish for unusual foot problems, but I digress…uh, where was I…) right, Lady Healer had a bit of difficulty measuring my foot’s current range of motion with the arm-sized angle measurer thingy, as I think she’s used to dealing with larger body parts. At least until it came to measuring the range of motion of Mr. Big Toe, which was easy, since it’s essentially zero.

In any event, Lady Healer struck me as competent and confident she could transform Mr. Big Toe from frozen to toe zen (c’mon, groan, I put at least 30 seconds of thought into that pun), and she even enjoyed my stories of The Great Wineglass Tragedy in Three Acts (now appearing on stage, Broadway here we come), so what’s not to like? Well, just one little thing: her admonition to wait just a few more weeks before running.

Arrgh. Just when you thought it was time to fly. Another delay. Might as well be on the airlines.

She’s right, and I know it, and I’ll listen, but I sure don’t like it. My plans to re-emerge by jogging the local Whitney Memorial 5K this weekend are, at the moment at least, off (though that can’t prevent me from popping down to the famed Horseshoe Pub – 75 brews on tap! – for the event). Instead of a mile or two tomorrow, it looks like it’s a few more weeks to loosen up the joints, further loosen my mental marbles, and loosen my belt a bit more till that fabulous carb burn rate returns.

I know it won’t kill me, I’ve survived the airlines.