<A HREF="http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MUSIC/blues/wb.html">Walking Blues</A>
Robert Johnson was thinking about a woman when he wrote Walking Blues. My Walking Blues are about my knees. Lately my sore knees have been kicking in as they seem to do every year.
My first knee pain dates back to sometime in my childhood around the age of 7 or 8. I was riding my BMX bike on one foot (both feet on one side of the bike) leaning into a turn when I wiped out underneath a parked car. I had skinned both of my knees so bad that my knee caps were completely red, with hardly any skin left on them. I remember lying in the grass on my back clenching my legs with my red knees pointed towards the sky, screaming in pain.
Since then my knee related ailments have come from various physical activities:
I have been riding a bike since a young age, and outside of wiping out, bicycles have never hurt my knees. However in the past month or so as my knee pain has come back, I come to a tail end of a summer where I have ridden my first century and in fact rode two centuries one day after another on the STP. My knees did not hurt during the ride nor have they hurt in long distance rides I have done since then, but when I walk a lot (1 mile +), they really start bothering me. To the point sometimes where I can feel them throb as I fall asleep.
Considering the lack of pain on the bike, I was skeptical it was the cause. Last summer when my knees kicked in, I started going to the Sweatbox, and the yoga seemed to remedy the pain. Well this time around I have been having trouble squeezing in time for yoga, and have been choosing to live with my bad knees.
Discussing this subject a coworker who had experienced bad knees at one point, led me to his “walking style”. Not really a *style* per say, but a way of walking that distributes load across your feet and reduces the direct impact on your knees. The basics are really simple, start on the outer edges of your heels and move to the ball of your foot. His wife had show him this walking technique, which comes from a book called Taking Root To Fly. After practicing this for a couple of days, I have noticed significant improvement, and learned a couple of key points:
I was really surprised at how much my running shoes were the source of pain. I have had them maybe six months, but in that time have managed to kill all support they provide in the outer heel which seems to have increased the pressure on my knees. What I didn’t realize was that the blown out running shoes were also causing me to walk improperly in all my other shoes, thus taking themselves out of the spotlight.
To the trash with my sneakers, to Amazon to track down a used copy of the now *out of print* “Taking Root To Fly”, so I can have a walking reference.
Leave a Reply