On Walking

Today I walked again.

It's not like I've not been on my feet and getting from one place to another. I've done that, with relatively little pain, but enough to know that I shouldn't do it for too long.

Today I rediscovered how to walk without a pronounced heel strike. I went for a barefoot walk to our neighborhood library, stopping and starting occasionally when my rhythm broke or when I lost my feeling of gravity. (It's possible to do that, especially when you're small!)

Something I've noticed is that even people who run barefooted still heel-strike when walking. I think it's because we've made assumptions about what walking means, what it looks and feels like. I remember reading posts by bf runners talking about how they were trying to learn forefoot or midfoot striking for walking gait and how hard it was.

So here's something to try today:

Take off your shoes and stand with one foot slightly behind the other. Don't try to point your toes straight ahead. Shift your weight onto the front foot and see if you can drop the back knee so that the hip releases and the foot glides forward slightly. You may find that it doesn't go anywhere at all, or you may find that the free leg's foot doesn't know how to leave the ground. When I first tried this walk, I couldn't get the leg through to the front without tucking the toe off the floor, tightening the ankle flexors and then the hip flexors (which may be in very different places but have a pretty strong connection, don't they?). Don't let the foot flex. Just keep releasing that femur down from the hip joint and allow it to slide it through by responding to gravity through both sides. Let the standing ankle really soften as the body moves forward, although it's easier said than done. The key is both ground reaction force and core work, of course - not clenching, gripping, six-packy wackiness, but motion all through the center of the body from ground to head that encourages the glide of the hip joint, softening of the knee and ankle joint. When it's right, the foot is just slightly plantarflexed as it passes through, with the ankle joint blissfully relaxed, toes rising just enough to clear the ground.

It started off mentally difficult with not much forward motion. It was very hard to get my working leg through without grazing the ground with the bottom of the foot, which is generally something to avoid when barefoot. I'm sure that many a motorist was wondering what the slow-moving, tiny barefoot lady was doing with her stop-and-start progress towards some good books and a turn around the neighborhood. (Do I dare wonder what kinds of comments I'd have gotten outside of the Bay Area?) They can think what they like.