June 28th, 2008
My Tired Feet
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Two months back, I thought of myself as a walker.
I walked for fun. I walked for exercise. I walked to digest my dinner. I walked to clean my head. I walked so that I could watch strangers. I walked so that I could talk with friends.
After I started my experiment and gave up my car, I walked all the time. I tried waking up early so that I could walk from my house in Cuffe Parade to my office in Kala Ghoda before the sun came up. I tried leaving office early so that I could walk over to Marine Drive before the sun went down. I walked to Churchgate station to catch local trains to the suburbs. I walked to New Marine Lines to watch French movies at Alliance Francaise. I met up with friends and dates for a walk on Marine Drive, or Worli Sea Face, or Bandra’s Carter Road, or Juhu’s Chowpatty Beach.
Late at night, I wore my Nike+ shoes, put in the sensor on my iPod Nano and walked the seven kilometers from Cuffee Parade to Girgaon Chawpati and back. I kept track of the time it took me to walk the fourteen kilometers and told myself that I was on track for my goal to run the marathon before I turned thirty. One weekend, I even walked the twenty odd kilometers from Cuffe Parade to Worli Sea Face.
In short, I liked walking, no, I loved walking. It kept me in shape, and it kept me sane.
Then, two months back, my feet started to hurt.
It first happened in a hotel room in Singapore early one morning, when I stepped off my bed and recolied from a sharp pain in the soles of my feet. I told myself that I was tired from the travel and promptly forgot about it.
Back in India, on my evening walks, I found that I was getting tired by the time I reached Girgaon Chawpati and couldn’t walk the seven kilometers back anymore. I first cut my walk shorter by taking a taxi to Nariman Point and only walking the ten kilometers from Nariman Point to Girgaon Chawpati and back. Then, I stopped going to Marine Drive entirely and only walked the three odd kilometers from Kala Ghoda to Cuffe Parade after work.
I then realized that my feet hurt all the time, irrespective of what shoes I wore, irrespective of whether I was walking or not.
Worried that I was unwell, I went through a comprehensive health check-up at Bombay Hospital. The test results told me that I was perfectly well, so I decided to see an Orthopedist instead. After a few more tests, it turned out that I was suffering from serious vitamin B12 and D3 deficiency. “It seems that you haven’t been eating at all,” the grandfatherly doctor chided me as he typed out the prescription on a typewriter of European origin, “if you hadn’t come to me now, your bones would have started to break in six months.”
So, suitably scared, I massage my feet with Moov three times a day and visit my neighborhood doctor once every week, where a pretty nurse asks me to lie down and pull down my trousers, before she injects vitamins in both my buttocks. After she asked me to turn over and offer her the other cheek, she soothingly tells me: “only one more little prick, and it will be all over.”
Since both vitamin B12 and vitamin D3 are almost absent in vegetarian food, eggs and cheese now make the core of my diet.
And, yes, I don’t walk anymore, not much anyway.
No wonder, my loyal love handles are back and it seems that even a smallish paunch is all set to reappear. It’s not the best thing to happen to you when you have just started dating the perfect woman, but that’s an altogether different post, isn’t it?
