How a Senior Citizen Prepares to Hike 800 Miles

Support for this trek is provided by a large number of people. For this post I focus on members of Team Heidi.

My feet cause me no end of problems. I have my first foot surgery in 2006, which turns out so badly that I vow to just live with it and never have my feet operated on again. But while working in San Jose, a colleague speaks highly of her podiatrist, and since at that point I am limited to only about 2 miles on a hike before I am in pain, I think I’ll at least see what he recommends. Dr. Smith provides corrective surgery the summer of 2014, which includes cutting and pinning the bones in two of my toes to straighten a problem I’d been living with for eight years.

Seven months later McKenna and I do a three-day shake out hike into Havasupai.

Happy, happy feet. Although the hike down into the canyon wrecks my knees and the hike out is physically taxing.

Really physically taxing. What am I thinking even planning an 800 mile hike?

This is the photo that I threaten my family to never never never ever show  to anyone. You can see why. And now I’m showing it to the world.

Next step is to figure out what is wrong with my knees. I try braces. I try stretching. I get trekking poles. While working in southern California for 10 months, Candace, my massage therapist, makes a good start at eliminating the tightness in my muscles.

Eventually, back home in the Bitterroot, I connect with Linda, my physical therapist, and Elizabeth, my muscle therapist. Between the two of them they help me stretch and strengthen my IT bands, eliminating the pain in my knees. Linda gives me some seemingly benign stretching exercises, but Elizabeth manhandles me until the muscles surrender. Other than maybe childbirth, Elizabeth inflicts the most pain I’ve ever endured. But it works.

So muscles are nicely stretched and I no longer have painful IT band syndrome every time I hike downhill. But what develops is a different type of pain in my knee. Linda explains that my large propelling muscles are strong and overpower my smaller stabilizing muscles, essentially pulling my knee cap off track. So I begin more exercises to strengthen my stabilizers, this time using a bosu ball. I squat on an inverted ball, trying to balance while moving up and down, side to side, without falling off. I look like I’m slaloming in place. It’s harder than it looks.

But eventually the knees feel better, although I find I need to keep up the exercises or the pain returns.