Toe Physical Therapy.. seriously

Last night I started toe physical therapy. I was a little embarrassed going in there, I have to admit. People were coming out on crutches, learning how to walk again, building up the muscles in their arms, rehabilitating a back injury. I sat on a table while the therapist moved my pinkie toe up and down.

The little guy just will not budge. I can move it down, and out to the side, but cannot lift it. The therapist attached this little machine that uses electronic pulses to make my muscles contract thus lifting my toes. She thought if we can get it to lift this way, we'll know the tendon is still attached. So she turned it on, I felt the tingling sensation and my toes lifted. All of them except one.

So I have some exercises to do at home to try and rehabilitate it. She said don't get discouraged, it may just take some time for it to respond again. In the meantime the therapist told me to sit there trying to lift the toe while saying, "Lift baby toe, lift!" in order to get my brain signal down there to the little guy.

And because it was not much of a workout at all (H and Jill got a good laugh over this the other day), I met Tim out for a grand tour of the new STA singletrack. We road ALL of it. Up Queen Bee Loop, around the Hive, down Hornet's Nest & Stinger, back up Yellow Jacket and out the Hive.



It was about 2 hours of fun twisty singletrack riding. I'm still a bit rusty this year on the very little technical stuff there is on these trails. A few rocks, one large root that I just bounced off of instead of going over, and some hairy switch back turns that I just barely made it through without falling over.

This area is great to get in work on my two biggest limiters: climbing and fast descents. I'm pretty excited about my downhill skills right now. A year ago all this downhill would have scared the crap out of me, but I felt completely comfortable letting it go a bit on the downhill. Not once did I think about endos or broken bones. Not that I don't think I will ever endo again, it's just pointless to worry about it all the time. If it happens, it happens. I still probably overuse my brakes a bit, but that should get better as I get used to these trails.