It's Gotta Be The Shoes

So we're well into our 2nd month with the treadmill desks.  As I posted before, Noah's down 18 pounds or so, and I'm down 11.  The past week and a half or so, I've sort of scaled back.  Not because I don't want to work hard, but because my time constraints are a little wacky.  Also, my feet were killing me.
When I was in residency something-teen years ago, I had a problem with plantar fasciitis.  It's basically an issue that causes inflammation and pain in the heel through the arch of the foot.  It's usually a challenge to treat, given that it takes a long time of daily stretches, ice and occasionally night splints.  I am pretty sure that 3 years of spending quite a bit of my time on my feet wearing what probably weren't the most supportive shoes caused it.  Once I got into private practice and wasn't walking the hospitals for hours at a time or standing in surgeries and so on, it resolved.  Oh, that and the daily stretching, icing and night splints.

Anyway, about 2 weeks into the walking, my old friend was back.  My arches hurt, my heels hurt, even my ankle hurt.  I assumed the ankle was just the tweaking of an old injury.  I've turned my ankles what feels like 100 times.  Four or five days of wearing an ankle splint and the ankle was back to solid.  The heels and arches?  Not so much.

So, I started looking at my shoes.  I'm a shoe girl.  I have lots of shoes.  My husband finds it crazy, since I pretty much wear the same 3 or 4 pair of shoes all the time.  And him?  He's got 3 pair: a pair of sandals for summer, some boots for winter and some dress shoes that he's probably had for 15 years.  I have sneakers, running shoes, walking shoes, dress shoes, work shoes, boots, sandals, strappy shoes, well, you get the idea.

I started digging out all of the vaguely athletic shoes I own. These vary from shoes I bought for trips, for hobbies, because they were cute, whatever.  Most of them were buried under other, more professional shoes.  I sort of gave up wearing sneakers for much, given that I had discovered the Chaco sandals for summer active wear, and really the only time I used the athletic shoes was for walking or when I flirted with running.

So I started with the Brooks.  The main problem I had with them was that they're old.  Like almost 10 years old.  Somehow my feet have changed enough and these shoes are old enough, they were pinching the backs of my heels and my achilles tendon.  After a day of wearing them at work, not even on the treadmill, I had more or less constant pain.  They got tossed on to the Goodwill pile.

Then I moved on to the Asics gel shoes that I got sometime last year.  I'm not sure why I got them, I guess I just like them.  They weren't bad.  The gel definitely helped with some of the heel pain, but really didn't seem to lost with long walking sessions.  Once I'd take a wee break, as soon as I started back up again, my heels and arches were aching.  So they were better than the Brooks (again I think their main issue was their age more than engineering), but not ideal.

So, I broke down.  I went to the sporting goods store.  The local one nearest my work is Dick's.  Or, as we like to call them, Richard's.  You know, to keep it family safe.  Now I know that Richard's is not staffed with experienced runners.  At noon on a May weekday, the chances are, it's not really going to be manned by running experts who will measure my shoe, watch me walk, assess whether I pronate or supinate, and so on.  I already knew a lot of that stuff based on buying the Brooks at Ninth St. Active Feet in Durham.  I got a guy who asked me what I'd like, he pointed me at the shoes on sale (I didn't want to spend a fortune), and I tried them on myself, walked around the place, decided out of the 3 pairs I tried that I liked the Saucony Cohesion, and bought them.  I still spent too much on them, but it was under $70, so no problem.  I liked the shoes.  I liked how they felt.  But like the Asics, after a while, my arches and heels started hurting again.  So close, but no cigar for the standing pair of shoes for wearing.

Realizing that I had bought a pair of the Saucony Kinvaras a couple of years ago for the Couch to 5k running program, I dug them out.  When I got them initially, I didn't like the way they fit.  I remember them being too small.  Once I had them out and tried them again, they seemed to fit fine.  Maybe my toes lost weight?  The thing I love about these shoes?  They are light.  I mean SUPER light.  Like, both of them together weigh less than a pound.  The mesh keeps my feet super cool.  They are super flexible in the sole.  They have a nice, ridged arch support, which felt great.  At first.  Then after about an hour and a half at any speed over 1.4 MPH, my arches started to ache, and how.  Once again, disappointment came in the form of my shoes.

In the process of all of this, I was mixing my Keen sandals.  The first day I walked in these, I hated them.  They are just a smidge too small around the ankle where the foot goes in.  They're the right length and have a great open toe box, but getting my feet in them is a challenge.  So I gave up on them fairly early, since after about 45 minutes, I was starting to have tingling in my toes.  No pain in the arches or the heels, which was a damn delight, but no feeling in my toes, which was very disconcerting.  So I gave up on them for anything other than weekend kicks, nothing to be used on the treadmill.

Then, earlier this week, Noah was bragging about a new pair of Skechers he picked up.  They had memory foam insoles.  They were comfortable and affordable (he had gotten a pair of Saucony running shoes, also at 9th Street Active Feet, after being measured and evaluated by an actual runner who was trained to put people in the right shoes).  He liked his shoes he had been using, but he had started to subscribe to my theory: shoe switching.  My best solution for the shoe issue was shoe rotation.  I don't mean wearing one pair one day and another pair another day.  I mean wearing one sort of shoe to work (usually Danskos or Clarks), slipping in to a pair of runners when I get home and then changing in a couple of hours.  Some particularly long walking days, I would change shoes 3 or 4 times.  In his search for a similar pair of shoes to swap out with his new running shoes (but ones that cost less than $170), he had found these memory foam insoled sport shoes.

They came today.  They're bright (although I have the option for blue laces, but what's the point of that?!?), they're light, and they're comfy.  I had to try them on twice, since the first time I put them on, I forgot to take out the cardboard insert on the bottom of them.  They have a built up heel, which takes a little getting used to, but that isn't as much of a problem as I was fearing it would be.  The raised heel seems to help with the PF pain, without putting too much pressure on my arches.
I think these shoes aren't going to be a miracle solution.  I mean, I like them, and I like them more than any of the others at this point.  However, I'm still fairly convinced that I'll need to stick with the shoe rotation approach.  The real challenge will be when I get into the bed tonight: how long will my feet ache before I fall asleep.  I am hoping the memory foam, and the experimentation with more compressive socks will be the ticket.
Either way, I'm on my 2nd mile today, with probably 2 more to go, and they're holding up pretty swell so far.

Thoughts about fathers. Well, more specifically, about mine.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s in Montana.  I was the middle of three children.  I spent the better part of my life being compared to my father, who was a radio personality until I was about 15, and then a politician for 20 years.

My dad did the farm and ranch reports on radio and TV.  If you grow up in a state where agriculture is a big part of the economy, that stuff is important.  The guy who comes on to let you know about Ag news in the morning on the radio and the noon news TV broadcast is a really important guy.  And it's generally the same guy every day for years.  My dad started a network, called the Northern Ag Network, that carried agriculture related news to television and radio stations across Montana and Wyoming.  It started in a wee office in Billings and grew.  I didn't realize at the time that it was a big deal.  I just knew that my dad's office was at a stockyards, where we could play in the sale ring area, play with the telephone/intercom system at the office, listen to ourselves talk into the DJ style headphones and watch how our voices spoken into a radio microphone made the needle bounce on the sound meters.

When I was 14, he ran for county commissioner.  It was mostly over a fight to get our road plowed.  And for him to be able to control and affect a few things in our county. He was pretty good at it.  Given his popularity as a radio personality, particularly with the ag folks in Montana (which is a lot of folks), he was then approached about and agreed to run for the U.S. Senate in 1988, which he won and then served for 18 years.  This piece isn't about that. It's not about his career.


It's about the other stuff my dad did.  My dad was old school.  And I mean Old School.  No hats allowed in the house.  No jeans worn to school or church.  Brush your hair, sit up straight and children are to be seen and not heard.  He was the kind of guy who grew up doing chores on a farm, so why the hell should he pay us an allowance to do the chores that just needed to be done and were our job to do anyway?
He traveled a lot.  Radio was a 4:30 am to 6 or 7 pm kind of job.  Mix into that things like Rotary, Toastmasters, and a golf club membership and genuine love for the game of golf, and we didn't see him much.  My mom had the usual "wait until your father gets home" when we would get into trouble.  And my dad was certainly scary enough when we were in trouble.

My dad was born in 1935.  That means he lived through WWII as a child.  He grew up on a ranch where he had hard chores.  Much harder than the "load the dishwasher and vacuum on Saturdays" chores I had.  He was in 4H and FFA and the Marine Corps (Semper Fi!).   He lived at a time when you could hitchhike, and when you could pick up hitchhikers relatively safely.  He lived at a time when racism was rampant, as was sexism.  He grew up in the best and worst time in our history, much like today. His own father literally bridged the gap from horse and carriage to men walking on the moon.  A lot of things changed over my dad's lifetime.  He worked hard, had success, had failures, had more successes and more failures and in there somewhere had a family.

There were expectations, as all fathers have for their children.  He expected that I would probably get married and have a family.  He expected that I would know how to do things all women should know: how to sew, how to cook, how to keep a home.  He was always ALWAYS annoyed that I never was required to take Home Economics in high school (they had eliminated the requirement by the time I was in high school).

I'm the cute one on the left. 

Despite those expectations, which were born of his time and his rearing by his own parents, he never once denied me my dreams.  If I wanted to be a dancer, he'd have been okay with that.  If I wanted to be a race car driver, that, too, would have been fine.  When I decided I wanted to be a teacher, like my mother, he endorsed that with enthusiasm.  When that plan changed and I decided to be a doctor, he put me in touch with his other doctor friends, so that they could encourage me and help me in that path.  He never, not once that I can recall, told me that no, I couldn't.  He never told me that math was for boys (no, that was my high school Algebra 2 teacher who did that).  He bought me a toolkit.  He taught me how to change a tire and change my own oil.  He expected me to know those things, as well as how to find a stud in a wall, how to put in a wall anchor, how to hook up a sound system, how to prime the well if it needed to be done.

He never once told me that once I had children I would have to stop working.  On the contrary, his only disappointment in me seemed to be that I hadn't joined rotary, the local golf club or other networking societies in order to grow my practice and be more successful as a physician and local member of the business community.  Instead of telling me that I couldn't, he expected me to do it and do it well with everything that I had.

But that was the dichotomy of my dad and his generation: he grew up in a time of defined roles for women and men, ones based on a traditional patriarchy.  Even so, he respected individuals, not groups.  He expected and demanded excellence (he wouldn't pay me to mow the lawn, since that was expected, but he would pay me $1 for every A I brought home on a report card).  He expected me to be good at what I chose to do, be it a housewife and mother or a doctor.

He grew up in a time of turmoil and change and confusion, but he was very steady in his hopes for his family: that we would succeed, find a place to create our own families and carve out our own niche in the world.
He's more or less gotten over the fact that I never took Home Economics, maybe because I knit and crochet and cook anyway.  He seems to have become less irritated at my lack of ability to keep a perfectly neat and clean house, because he recognizes it as my home.  My home.  My family.

He will always and ever be a part of me, a part of the reason that I understand that sometimes 80 year old men say racist or sexist things, but may not be racist or sexist in their intentions and day to day interactions.  He will always be the guy who gave me my freckles, my red hair, and my occasionally explosive temper.  But he also gave me a love of reading, a thirst for knowledge, a sense of obligation to my community and my sense of humor.  He showed me that you could work hard, laugh hard and you could succeed.  He went from a kid on a ranch to U.S. Senator, almost by sheer force of his own will.  Well that, plus a whole lot of hard work.

White House Congressional Picnic Summer 2006

I watched him be tough and remote and demanding.  I watched him spend hours and hours away from home, but then later realized that it was to build his business to provide for us in a way his parents couldn't.  I have since watched him play with my daughter with such gentleness, but also such great expectations for her to do amazing things.  I've watched him make my mother so frustrated and angry that I was sure they were going to split up, but then be so gentle and loving and grateful to her that it breaks my heart how much they've taught me about marriage.  I've watched him discipline his children with sternness, but love.

The first time I saw my father cry, it was in an emergency room when I was 13.  His gurney was next to mine, and he was holding my hand, silently crying.  I didn't know it until a bit later, but my sister had died and we would spend the weekend in the hospital with carbon monoxide poisoning.  That same week, he was stern and unflinching at her funeral, directing us to not wear black, to hold it together.  Not because he wasn't grieving, but because that was the expectation for his generation: men are strong for their families. They don't cry.

It as the era of "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche" and "Real Women Don't Pump Gas".  He taught me to pump my own gas anyway. By no means was he a perfect guy or a perfect father.  Don't get me wrong.
I've watched him absorb my anger, the anger of a 20 year old questioning her faith, her family and her identity, and love me through it anyway. And never have I seen anything more lovely than the joy and sheer love on his face when he first held my daughter on her first day of life, and told me he was proud of me: as a daughter, as a mother, as a doctor, as me.  Whatever it was I was choosing to be (at the time it was a single working mother), he was proud of me and he loved me and my daughter and, yes, eventually my husband as well, whom he accepted into our family like on of his own.  Yes, he has expectations for all of us, including my husband, but he loves us.

Mom and Dad at the White House Christmas Party 2006

I've watched him go from the strong, healthy, active man I grew up with to a man challenged by a stroke 5 years ago that left him weak and feeling vulnerable.  I've watched his frustration grow at his poorly functioning left side.  I've watched him swallow his pride and ask for help.  But in that time, I've also seen his resolve: to not quit, to continue to work, to find a way to adapt and still function.  I've watched him admire my mother in a way that I've never seen.  It's encouraged me and made me realize what marriage really means: for better or worse, in sickness and in health.  It doesn't mean 'so we'll always be happy and perfect.'  They've demonstrated it so well without even meaning to do so.  I recall an interview at the end of his Senate career, one reporter asked him what he was most proud of after his time in Washington.  His answer?  "I'm coming home with the same wife I started with."

I used to be annoyed that people would ask me, "Are you Conrad's daughter?" as I saw it as a denial of my own identity as a woman in favor of one that was only the extension of a man's identity (someone's wife or someone's daughter). I used to say, "well, yes, but I have my own personality, you know."  Now, if someone asks, I proudly say, "Yes, I am.  I am his daughter.  That's my dad."

One month down, the rest of our lives to go

So as of today, we've had the treadmill desks for one month.
That's been a month of literally walking through our video games.
-It's been a month of experimenting with best shoes, socks and even pants for walking extended periods of time.
-It's been a month of trying to figure out how not to overload the circuit where our computers are, since running 2 treadmills, 2 computers, the lights and the window A/C unit seems to be a real strain.
-It's been a month of waiting for Noah to drill the channel holes so that the big bunch of unsightly cords in the middle of our desk can go somewhere else.
-It's been a month of discovering that rotating shoes throughout the day helps with the foot pain.  So does sitting at work with my feet on ice packs.
-It's been a month of discovering that when you walk a couple miles every day, you sleep the sleep of the righteous.
-It's been a month of drinking more water, thinking more about vegetable choices and healthier lunches, but still having a beer or two when the feeling strikes.

I've been avoiding achievements lately, but this one I'm kind of happy with. 

Draken Warrior on a Warpig.  At a party.
Cause that's how we do it.  

-It's been a month of not really missing much in World of Warcraft: my priest managed to get her 27k conquest point achievement for this season and she's in full Prideful Gladiator gear.  My paladin is slowly getting her points (we started playing her late in the season with Noah's shaman).  In other words, all of the things that I enjoy doing in WoW right now, we're still doing.
-It's been a month with experimenting with a new game, Wildstar.  We've got several characters, we're taking our time exploring Nexus and all it has to offer in terms of new game play and features.  But we're having a tremendous amount of fun.

-It's been a month of encouraging the kid to join us in our exercise by bribing her to walk 2000 steps a day when she's not in school.  She liked it a first, but now it's just "boring."  Either way, she understands that we want her to be active, because we're active.  And that's a nice thing.
-It's been a month of learning when to just be okay with walking away from the computer, sitting down on the couch and icing my feet.  Since this time, getting away from the computer involves sitting still instead of the other way around, it's a strange feeling to know that computer time is activity time.
-It's been a month of improvement with my bowling team, which I know is not really related, but it is. Before I knew we'd be doing this treadmill thing, I agreed to this social bowling thing. Sunday nights we bowl 3 games against another team in the same social league.  The first week, I was exhausted at the end of it.   I spent the week sore and in pain.  The next weeks were varying: pain from the soreness, pain from being out of shape, exhaustion.  But something amazing has happened the last 3 or 4 weeks: I'm not as exhausted at the end of 3 games.  I'm not sore every single Monday through Thursday.  Last week I was the high score (with my handicap, of course) for women.  Granted, bowling once a week has improved my game, but it's improved more than ever since my stamina and my lower body strength has improved.
-It's been a month of hopefulness when I get dressed in the morning.  I know that sounds crazy: losing weight, when you're a woman who has struggled with weight most of her adult life, makes your closet an emotional minefield.  There are the clothes you wish still fit, the clothes you know won't fit, the clothes that you can fit and the ones that will definitely fit.  Generally, I wear the same 5 or 6 outfits to work because I know they fit.  Or at least they work.  I hate the idea of buying more clothes at a size I don't like to be.  I'm the heaviest I've ever been in my life, and it makes me avoid cameras, shun mirrors, and withdraw a little bit. But now some pants that were a little too snug fit a little better.  Some skirts look a little nicer. I'm not kidding myself, I've still got a long way to go (about 80 to 90 pounds, actually), but that first time you pull on a pair of pants that didn't fit a while ago is such a great feeling, I can't even quite describe it.

-Mostly, it's a month where we've shown our kid that it's okay to exercise and that it's fun to be healthy, not juts about body image or shape.  I have this amazing 8 year old who finishes 2nd grade today.  She's going to do amazing and wonderful things, and I want to be around to see them all.  So, I'll just keep walking.
And hopefully, somewhere down the road, she'll realize that exercise is an important part of who she is, too.  Not because she wants to be a specific size or shape, but because she wants to love herself and her body enough to treat it well.  It's a vehicle and she needs it for the long trip ahead.  Hopefully she'll see our attempts to maintain our own as a guide for her own life.

Treadmill desk update

So, we're still plugging away at the desks.  What choice do we have?  A new game launched this week and we enjoy playing it.  So we walk our way through the Nexus in Wildstar, and we're still feeling pretty great about it.
Noah, of course, has lost 10 pounds.  I'm hovering at 5.  Typical.  Admittedly, we haven't significantly changed our diet (although I find us choosing healthier snacks as a whole), and he walks faster than I do.

Anyway, the exciting part here is that I finally got the bluetooth connectivity with my PC worked out.  There is a club that you can join through Lifespan, the company we bought the treadmill from, and it will help you set goals, track your workouts, etc.
There is an app available for either iOS or Windows, no android availability--boo.
You get your membership number with the treadmill, get it all put in and registered, and you can track your work out.
That saves me from having to do the spreadsheet updates.  The spreadsheet was working well, but if the power went out or the key from the treadmill got knocked out, the data was lost.  It would make me sad.
Now, it's just tracked as I go.  And once the workout stops, that is, the control panel is reset, then it syncs up with the website.  I love it.

It tracks your 7 day totals while you're doing it.  I can minimize it all down so it's just the gray column on the right.
Problems with it: can't move it.  It is set slap in the middle of the primary screen off to the right.  No putting it up in a corner or on the other side.  I dislike this immensely.  But I can live with it.

The website dashboard is nice and I still don't have it all quite set up:

You can set short, medium and long term goals, put in your health data like sugar, A1c, cholesterol, blood pressure, etc.  It will show a graphical demonstration of your progress and work outs.  You can upload your workout data via USB, Bluetooth or other connectivity.  You can even go back and put in the data manually.  Well, that's only if you obsessively keep a spreadsheet of your daily activity.

Anyway, I feel like this more automated tracking just constantly is cheering me on.  I can see if I've met my daily goals (time, steps, miles, etc--mine happens to be 10k steps a day), I can see how close I am to my 3, 6 or 12 month goals.  I can join a team if I want in order to get the online support I need.

Of course, the support I've been seeing from my friends is about as great a team as I could ask for.
So I'll keep on walking.