Hip Recovery + New Walking Hacks + A Realization

Hey League! 

I have a mishmash of things to cover on this splendid fall Friday. If you are in the southeast US, please stay safe from the hurricane! 

Surgery Update
I’m now 4 months post-surgery for my hip replacement and happy to report I was fully unleashed to resume all activity. I am back to strength training, yoga, rucking, and hiking with no restrictions. Everything has gone smoothly and I couldn’t have asked for better results.

A full recovery takes 12-18 months as it takes time for bone cells to fully fuse to the implant and for nerves to heal. The more I move every day, the better I feel. I’m walking 10-12,000 steps most days and it’s glorious! 

My New Walking “Hacks”
I am a bit of a completionist, meaning I like to finish all the parts of a larger goal, like finishing a jigsaw puzzle or collecting all of the books in a series. To track my hikes, I use the Gaia Maps app. When you record an activity, it makes a colored track on the map. I’ve started using the app to track my daily walks and rucks. Now I have a goal of walking every street and alley in our town so that the entire map is filled in with a rainbow of track lines. It’s an extra bit of motivation to get out when I’m not feeling it.

Many days, I pick up my son at school. Anyone who does this knows how not-fun the parent pickup/drop-off circle can be. Since our son is older, I avoid the drop-off area and wait on a nearby street.  I park the car an hour before and I use that hour to walk. I usually put on a podcast which tends to help me keep a faster pace. I’ve found that it’s a neat way to get to know your town from another perspective. I notice different things when I’m not behind the wheel of a car such as the amazing gardens people have. Yesterday, I saw someone with a pear tree. I had no idea pears could grow in northern Minnesota. Anyways, this park-and-walk has made it really easy to get in a lot of steps every day with an extra bonus of getting a good parking spot! Previously, I’d just sit on my phone while I waited. Walking is definitely time better spent.

Speaking of podcasts, Katy Bowman’s Move Your DNA podcast had a great episode about movement in menopause and the ways movement can influence the changes in our bodies and brains at that time in life. Highly recommend! 

My Realization
The other day I took a short three-mile hike to forage for mushrooms. The last mile was all uphill and I marveled that it felt like an easy walk. Over the last couple of years, the previous times I hiked that stretch, it felt like running a marathon. Prior to my hip replacement, it was frustrating because I couldn’t move efficiently and didn’t even realize it was happening. My range of motion was so inhibited that I expended a lot of energy to do basic tasks like walking. I didn’t understand that my exhaustion and significantly slower pace were due to poor movement mechanics.

I hated walking for a long time as a result of that frustration. It was a suffer fest for me, and not in a fun way. Now that my body can move normally, everything in life is much easier. I no longer feel like I ran for miles after a short hike. I can now enjoy a five-mile walk and not spend the rest of the day recovering. 

It’s amazing how quickly we can lose our healthy movement patterns and not realize it’s happening. It takes an immense amount of energy for the body to compensate for poor movement patterns, and it makes moving exhausting. If you find that happens to you, don’t hesitate to get evaluated. Being able to move normally is so important and the loss of mobility can happen so slowly over time that we don’t always feel it happening. I never had pain in my hip joint. I just couldn’t move efficiently. Even when I felt like I was walking fast, my pace was slow and I was tired and stiff after. I attributed it to getting older. It’s not. If something feels harder than it should, there might be a treatable reason for it! 

I hope you can get out and enjoy the wild this weekend. Marvel at the ways that your body can move! 

-Kim