Omega Point

In Which Catherine Is No Longer Lazy

So I recently started jog­ging. I know, I know, I’m ruin­ing my image as couch­bound layabout, but it’s true. (If, by chance, you were unfa­mil­iar with this image, let me take this oppor­tu­nity to spoil all chance of being thought of as in par­tic­u­larly good shape.)

I’m tall. Really, really tall. (Yes, taller than that one friend of yours. No, I don’t care if he’s sin­gle. A swim­mer, you say? Does he have a sister?)

Now, what you may not be aware of is that there tends to be a few down­sides to being tall.

On the plus side, I never get heart­burn and laugh heartily at the signs that read “please ask for assis­tance for items on this shelf” at the phar­macy. On the other hand, humans tend not to have joints built to han­dle a larger frame, and with much greater dis­tances to pump, our hearts don’t work as long.

One other issue tall peo­ple can face is actu­ally pretty dif­fi­cult to claim as a par­tic­u­larly bad thing, — though it is if you’re as unaware of it as I was. Dif­fer­ences in pro­por­tion and scale being what they are, I can gain 20 or 30 (or 60) pounds with­out any­one really notic­ing much dif­fer­ence.¹ Includ­ing me, unfor­tu­nately. (Yes, that’s right. I just com­plained about my appear­ance being too for­giv­ing. Stone me now.)

How­ever, as ridicu­lous a “prob­lem” as that is, it’s actu­ally not super for one’s health, par­tic­u­larly if you don’t real­ize it for a year. In late 2008, wracked with knee pain so severe that my doc­tors had been talk­ing about osteoarthri­tis and the pos­si­bil­ity that I might be unable to walk by the age of 40, it was dis­cov­ered that I was just in dis­as­trously poor shape. In fact, despite walk­ing fairly reg­u­larly and hav­ing a “healthy” BMI^[2], I’d man­aged to develop vir­tu­ally no mus­cle mass whatsoever.

On the one hand, this was a relief. On the other hand, it would have been nice to have had no cul­pa­bil­ity whatsoever.

So, back I went to phys­io­ther­apy. Again. Years ago, I tore the crap out of my rota­tor cuff while work­ing as a shop assis­tant in a giant ladies’ cloth­ing store. Car­ry­ing jeans, yes. You see, the thing about jeans for tall women is that they have to be much longer, con­tain more fab­ric, etc. The thing about bones for tall women is that they don’t just tend to be longer, they also tend to be big­ger. So we’re not talk­ing about car­ry­ing around Size 0 capris here, we’re talk­ing dozens of pairs of Size 16 and 22 jeans, each leg sev­eral inches longer than what a reg­u­lar store car­ries. It adds up, trust me.

Mes­sage­board tes­ti­mo­ni­als sug­gested Vancouver’s best phys­io­ther­a­pist was Kelvin Tam of Kelvin Phys­io­ther­apy Clinic. I am pleased to report that this appears to be highly accurate.

“So let me guess,” he said, look­ing at my chart. “You hurt your shoul­der play­ing volleyball?”

“No.”

“Bas­ket­ball? Soft­ball? Soccer?”

“…lift­ing pants?”

I think Kelvin still thinks I might be mak­ing that up. This would be much bet­ter if I hadn’t seen him a fur­ther time for my elbow, suf­fer­ing from both golfer’s and ten­nis elbow — from using the mouse too much. I had to make a sig­nif­i­cant lifestyle change there too as well.

Annoy­ingly, if I had injured my shoul­der or elbow play­ing sports, I prob­a­bly wouldn’t have had this prob­lem with my knees. Of course, I likely wouldn’t have suf­fered those injuries either.

So, sev­eral months of phys­io­ther­apy and exer­cise later, I’m finally mov­ing up from walk­ing to jog­ging. So far, things seem to be work­ing out okay. I’m cur­rently in week two of the Couch-to-5K Run­ning Plan from Cool Run­ning. So far, so good, but it’s pretty exhaust­ing, I have to say. I sus­pect I’m still not quite in good enough shape, given my strug­gles last week, so I’ve inserted a sec­ond “week one” into my own exer­cise regimen.

I’ve also been eying the Nike+iPod gad­get for my iPhone — which is ridicu­lous, frankly. I don’t need that and I really don’t want to use any of their social media fea­tures like shar­ing how far I’ve run/limped about. Let’s all just assume that things are going really well for me, okay?

Any­way, deal­ing with sports bras and run­ning shoes is novel, but deal­ing with bikes is fun! Yes, I’m secretly an aspir­ing bike nerd, and I’m finally able to ride one again. Sadly, it turns out that Catherine-sized bikes are fairly dif­fi­cult to come by, but I’m pleased to report things are pro­gress­ing smoothly despite that. I will post details of the great bike-building project shortly!

[1] Case in point: as of the writ­ing of this post, the last time a close friend has called me a “skinny bitch” was approx­i­mately 36 hours ago.

[2] Seri­ously, Body-Mass Index is the worst pos­si­ble mea­sure of phys­i­cal fit­ness there is. Not only does it have trou­ble scal­ing at the top and bot­tom ends, but it doesn’t even account for what that mass con­sists of. Ouch.