As many of you know, I am addicted to being active. Whether it is going to the gym, riding my WingFlyer or kickboxing, I really have to be doing something a few times a week or I start to get a little stir crazy (or cray cray as the kids say). So as a “middle-aged” athlete, that inevitably results in injuries, which includes a calf muscle tear that happened to me recently while kickboxing.  It was actually pretty devastating, painful and scary, but amazingly it led to a device that has taught me a lot about life: my walking boot.

Some incredibly strange things have been happening to me since putting that walking boot on, and I felt compelled to write about some of them.

1. I have spent exactly zero minutes holed away in my home office (can’t get upstairs because I refuse to scoot up the stairs on my bottom) and almost the entire time I am home I am with everyone else in the house.  I normally always have some time with the family, but now with this injury I have tons of time with them and you know what?  It is awesome!  If you are home office bound a bunch, I highly recommend you break out of that habit, even if only for a week just to give it a try.
2. All of a sudden I am talking with more random strangers than I ever have in my life.  It’s like the walking boot is the ultimate conversation piece.  When anyone sees me in a hallway, on an elevator or any other random place the chances of them asking “what happened to you?” are extremely high.  Usually that results in them exchanging their own walking boot story with me, thus becoming what I affectionately refer to now as one of my “boot buddies”.
3. The one exception to this newly found popularity has been when I attempted (because of the aforementioned fitness sickness) to go to the gym, I learned that they have almost no desire to be around a person in a walking boot.  I must have gotten in the way of at least a dozen people as I attempted to get some form of an upper body & core workout completed.  Sadly, I was definitely one of them prior to my walking boot, so the lesson I learned is to be more patient going forward.  We will see if I can make that stick or not, but my guess is that I will.

In the end, this injury has been a mixed blessing.  I have been unable to do a few things that I love doing, but I have found or rediscovered several things that I may love doing even more!  It’s amazing how something as simple as being lame can totally alter your perspective on life!