The old lady

In recent weeks, a new women's fitness class has been started where I work out at Breakaway Sports Training. I really like being back with Jason, my physical therapist. He used to teach a general fitness class on Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings, but that's now become a Speed and Agility class taught by a young trainer named Joe, a high school senior and a certified personal trainer. While I like Joe, I prefer working with Jason because I have a long history with him as both PT patient and trainee and I feel more comfortable with someone I know like that. As it is, I've been wrestling with a lot of insecurity being in a class full of kids, so when the women's class began a few weeks back, it came as a major relief being able to train with people closer to my own age. Well, now I come to find out that I am the oldest participant in the whole Breakaway program. Oh. Great. Just the thing I need to find out to further increase my insecurity. I've been wrestling with this for a good long time now, and part of that insecurity also comes from my left leg being shorter than my right leg and the large lift I have to wear on my left shoe, and the fact that as a result, my left leg will always be weaker and will tire faster than my good leg. It limits what shoes I can wear and when I see what kind of tennis shoes everyone else is wearing, some of them especially made for the kind of fast footwork type of stuff we do, I feel even more frustrated by the fact that I can only wear maybe one or two styles of tennis shoes, and only ones with a totally flat sole that a lift can be built on to. I can't wear any kind of cross trainer shoe, nothing with gel or air or anything of the kind. I often feel like that heavy lift makes my leg slower as well as making it tire faster and that gets to me on occasion as well.

Lately, when we've been taking our water breaks, it takes me a bit longer than others to get to my water bottle and I often want to drink a large draught of water before going back to the exercise floor. Jason is always yelling at me to hurry up and get back over to start another exercise, and I always joke, "I'm coming, I'm coming, just be patient with the old lady, now!" I try to make light of it but that heavy lift on my left shoe and my often more tired left leg slow me down sometimes. I'm not as light on my feet as I was 20-25 years ago now. I do OK for someone my age and I'm proud of what good shape I'm in compared to so many other people I see out there, but I get sick of feeling like my left leg slows me down so badly. If it's not that, it's my right Achilles tendon, which has been paining me badly for some time now. Jason gave me some good stretches and exercises to do for it and I've really got to get around to trying them to see if they will relieve a lot of the pain I've had in that tendon lately. I wonder if I've got a touch of tendinitis there, given how tender it's been lately. It hurts just to touch it, and that concerns me. I'll try to remember to start doing the exercises Jason gave me and see if that works, and if not, I suppose I'll have to wear an ankle support when exercising from now on. Push comes to shove, if it doesn't improve, then I'll see my doctor about it and see what he says, but for now, I'm going to try a little PT on it and see how that does. So Breakaway's resident "old lady" will probably still be limping toward the water bottle for a while yet!