Yeah, fine, walk the dog

I saw my foot for the first time in five days today. It was skinny and purple. Feet are already skinny so you can imagine my surprise when I saw that my foot muscles (who knew?) have atrophied already.

It happens fast. I'm losing my calf muscle in that leg too (bad for ice climbing!). I guess when you don't roll up on your toes, you don't use your calves.

Other than that it looked great. The toe is back where it was supposed to be and I was even able to lift it a little bit! Not too much though, because it is still healing. In one week I start in on physical therapy again.

I asked the doctor, "Soo, how much am I actually allowed to walk in this boot?"

He said, "What, do you want to go for a hike or something?" and laughed.

I lied and said, "No, but maybe I want to just walk the dog a little bit."

He said sternly, "Yeah, fine, walk the dog. But keep that boot on."

I really wanted to ask if I could find a way to install clips to the heel of this boot and ask him if pedaling a little bit would really hurt? But I didn't want to push it. He seemed annoyed that I wanted to mess with his masterpiece at all.

It's only been five days, and I'd like to get this healing process over with. So I will continue to rest and get things done around the house.

But man six days without hard exercise is tough. Your body gets used to a certain amount of exercise. I was biking and hiking up to 16 hours a week in July, so just stopping exercise all together is a huge jolt to my system. My body is longing for a hard effort and my lungs are like "WTF, we haven't been burning in a week, what is gong on?"

I'm hoping once my incision heals (it's huge by the way) that I will be able to start doing some swimming. More on that later. This week I'm just going to slowly start doing some weight lifting for my upper body, pull ups (need to get in climbing shape), and crunches. Hopefully that will be enough to get the endorphins flowing again.