Walking the walk

Today, for those of you who don’t keep up on such things, is World Sauntering Day. This is a day during which one is supposed to walk in a “very casual, yet stylish” way. Of course, it never fails but that today would be the day I spent limping around everywhere I’ve had to go.

I woke up this morning badly dehydrated, and when I tried to get out of bed, both of my legs cramped up, and I collapsed. After stretching them out some, I was able to stand up, and eventually get ready for work. I almost didn’t make it to the car, but I did somehow get into the office. I spent the rest of the day hobbling as my calf muscles (the gastrocnemii, to be technical) slowly unwound. Even once they’d loosened up again, they hurt from having been cramped up for so long.

Knowing that I was dehydrated, and that this was likely the cause of the excruciating cramps in my legs, I drank a huge quantity of water today. In spite of this, it took until well after lunch before I could even walk at more than a slow, grinding pace. Even now, my legs ache when I walk. What should I have done to speed up this process?

The web offers little help. I have found any of a number of sites which recommend that I gently stretch the muscles that are cramping, which I certainly did. Suggestions for gentle massage also abound. Several sites suggest that one should attempt to replace lost electrolytes, as well. I had already thought of that, and tried drinking a bottle of Gatorade that I bought when I had to stop for gas on the way to work. I pity the poor clerk who tried to make pleasant conversation with me as I limped up to the counter. I fear I might not have been polite. Perhaps as punishment for my treatment of the clerk, the Gatorade did nothing to ease the discomfort in my legs.

I begin to fear that this is a problem for which there is no quick and easy solution. My conditioning in a culture of instant gratification has made me ill-equipped to deal with this situation. With luck, however, it will have gone away on its own by morning. Tomorrow, so help me, I will saunter.

Participation Points

It occurs to me that what I often do here, writing about my thoughts as inspired by reading something in a book (a la the Animals in Translation series of posts), is pretty much what my tutorial professor back in college claimed he was trying to get me to do when he gave our class what I still consider to be one of the most ineffective assignments I ever did in my entire four years of (predominantly quite satisfactory) undergraduate classes.

What he wanted us to do was a reading journal, written as we were reading through our assigned book, The Fountainhead. (The class was on Frank Lloyd Wright. The main character of the book is purportedly based on him, and we had to read something of length to “test” our academic skills in what amounted to a prep class.) We were given no real guidelines about how to keep this journal. I even remember asking if there was a length requirement, or a suggested number of entries, and being told no, we should just write when we were inspired to do so. So I did.

One thing you must understand about me is that I read very quickly when I’m reading fiction, and tend to become absorbed enough in the story that I literally do not see chapter breaks at all. (That whole “I’ll just read to the end of this chapter” self-deal thing is kind of pointless as a result, alas.) I really had to make myself think about it consciously in order to stop reading and write something down more than once every 100 pages or so. I was quite pleased with myself when I finished the assignment and had eight pages, front and back, of journal entries.

The person who turned in her journal just before me had 60.

I received a poor grade.

I was not pleased.