Knots Landing

The closet purge wasn’t the only thing on this week’s list. Today I did something for the rest of me: 90 minutes, full body, face-down on a table while someone made a small, temporary dent in the damage.

Here’s what nobody warns you about foot surgery: the foot is the smallest part of the problem. The stress of the whole production has been parked in my shoulders for weeks, and a cranky foot and ankle have my entire right side bracing in self-defense. None of that does a body any good.

I learned this the hard way the first time. After the 2022 left foot rebuild, I started biweekly full-body massages once the stitches were out and kept them up until I was free of the boot. It wasn’t a luxury. It was structural maintenance.

Because here’s what crutches and a propped-up leg actually do to you. They wreck your lower back. Then the hips and the one working leg take a beating, pulling double duty to hold the whole operation together while their partner-in-recovery is exiled to the world of non-weightbearing. Then partial weightbearing. The good leg never signed up for that workload, and it lets you know.

Having someone work the knots and kinks out doesn’t only save my back. It saves my mind. There’s something about an hour and a half where the single thing required of me is to lie still and breathe. For a brain that’s been running surgical simulations on a loop, that is not nothing.

So I’m starting early. I’ll likely squeeze one more in right before surgery, then settle into the real rhythm once I’m on the mend. Call it pre-covery: getting the body as unknotted as possible before I ask it to do something hard.

For the record, I only go to Georgetown Massage and Bodywork. When you’re handing over a body that’s already compensating in five directions, you go to the people who know what they’re doing. I’ve been going to them since 2016 or so, usually when I’m deep in a major training block and asking a lot of my body. This is just a different kind of training block.

Onto the protocol it goes: biweekly, 90 minutes, therapeutic or sports. My foot may be the patient, but the rest of me is doing the heavy lifting.