Since ankle sprains are a very common injury, i thought i’d summarize some of the things i’ve found researching a healing and prevention program. Please note that i don’t have a background in health or fitness, so this comes with the usual disclaimer: When in doubt, please ask a health care provider, such as your doctor or a physical therapist.

The very first thing you gotta do, is rice the injury! That’s rest, icing, compression, and elevation. (Elevating your legs while sitting is a great thing to do no matter what, actually). Right after my injury (well, okay, after i hobbled home…), i applied ice for 20 minutes twice with a 30 minute break in between.

Rehabilitation is a bit trickier, i found. According to Consumer Reports, it’s best to start using the ankle again as soon as you can:

You shouldn’t move so much that it hurts a lot. Try doing a little bit more each day. Getting moving early on with an ankle support should help you get back to normal faster than resting with your foot in a plaster cast. [...] The research shows that it doesn’t seem to make much difference whether you have an elastic bandage, tape, a lace-up support or a stiffer ankle support.

So, rest the ankle for 48-72 hours as much as you can and then get moving again – making sure to support the ankle in some way (instructions on how to tape are here). Now, use caution! Obviously, you don’t want to run a marathon 4 days after you sprained your ankle! But walking around is a good idea and also starting some basic exercises to ensure mobility are called for (scroll down about half-way to “Exercises for sprained ankle rehabilitation”).

You can find lots more information, including more rehab exercises here and here.

If you know of any other good exercises for strengthening the ankles, especially once you’ve used to successfully prevent respraining your ankles, please share in the comments!

John Cloud, the article’s author, began to ask himself, too: “Why am I doing this?” His answer, in part: To lose weight.

One of the most widely accepted, commonly repeated assumptions in our culture is that if you exercise, you will lose weight. [...]

The conventional wisdom that exercise is essential for shedding pounds is actually fairly new. As recently as the 1960s, doctors routinely advised against rigorous exercise, particularly for older adults who could injure themselves. Today doctors encourage even their oldest patients to exercise, which is sound advice for many reasons: People who regularly exercise are at significantly lower risk for all manner of diseases — those of the heart in particular. They less often develop cancer, diabetes and many other illnesses. But the past few years of obesity research show that the role of exercise in weight loss has been wildly overstated. [...]

The basic problem is that while it’s true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn’t necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

Of course, exercise isn’t a total waste of your time. There are many other benefits to it, as Cloud outlines, just weight loss isn’t one of them at least not automatically, especially with high-intensity work-outs in “halls of mirrors.”

In addition to enhancing heart health and helping prevent disease, exercise improves your mental health and cognitive ability. [...]

But there’s some confusion about whether it is exercise — sweaty, exhausting, hunger-producing bursts of activity done exclusively to benefit our health — that leads to all these benefits or something far simpler: regularly moving during our waking hours. We all need to move more [...]. But do we need to stress our bodies at the gym?

That is my question! Is it worth spending all that money – according to Cloud $19 billion per year – to go to the gym or can I just lace up my shoes and walk, like my mom?

Well, the research suggests that regular low-intensity exercise is just as beneficial as short bursts of intense exercise, like the gym-type stuff. As Cloud puts it

Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical activity — the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented — may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat.

So, if you’re sweating in the gym to lose weight, you might want to reconsider. It’s better for your wallet (no gym membership) and the environment (no driving to the gym to work out on machines that require electricity) to simply go out and walk – and we now know that the research, too, shows that it’s better for our waistline.

I have finally implemented my plan to follow my mother’s routine and walk half an hour every morning even if that means I have to get up at the dreaded hour of 6 AM. I used a week off to get started with that routine. So far, it has at least one of the hoped for benefits: I sleep better!

Unfortunately, I quickly ran into a problem: Shin pain. I realized that I had started out way too quickly, not allowing my shins to adjust to the new strain. Apparently, this is a rather common problem for new race walkers. I found a lot of exercises to strengthen the shins (some of them I can highly recommend!). But as much as I looked, there was no sample workout schedule for absolute beginners out there. I could find oodles of programs for getting off the couch and running a 5K. No such luck with race walking. Since the shin exercises didn’t seem to do much good, I gave up – on the race walking, not the exercises.

I kept in touch with the people from the Golden Gate Race Walkers, though, and during a recent fitness walk, I ended up doing some race walking. I loved it! And I noticed no shin pain! We had been walking for more than an hour before starting the race walking, so I figured my legs were just well warmed up. The experience rekindled my interest in race walking but I still didn’t know how to slowly start to race walk, allowing enough time for my body to adjust to the technique. And then, I looked in that old book the founder of GGRW had given me. There it was: a training schedule! I was excited and ready to try again.

I just came back from my first race walk. My shins were screaming at me after 5 minutes, so I stopped and stretched. I remembered from the Dave McGovern article that it’s important to watch the stride: Reaching out too far up front can cause shin pain. So, after my stretching I started out slowly watching my stride, pushing off with a long leg in the back but only taking a small step in front. When my shins said something again, I counted my steps. According to the Howard Jacobson schedule, I am supposed to take 90-120 steps per minute. I was way faster! I slowed down and soon was smiling: no shin pain!

Lessons learned: Watch proper form and start out slow! There are plenty of resources on technique. And thanks to Howard Jacobson’s book published in 1980, I now have a schedule for easing into race walking.

Don’t get me wrong: Being active is important. But there’s no evidence that we have to work out hard every single day for 3 hours. In fact, the more and harder we work out, the higher our risk of injury. Or our risk of overtraining. I have done that without realizing it (“I am no Olympic athlete therefore I cannot overtrain,” is what I thought not acknowledging that it’s all relative…). I know that I sleep better and feel better when I work out some. But I still have the notion that I just cannot be lazy for a day. Plus, somehow writing and reading is not doing something (tell that to any author!). It is amazing what surfaces when I watch my thoughts: Unless I’ve worked out so hard that I almost faint at the end, I haven’t been active. How absurd! And how unhealthy!

So, you guessed it, I am struggling with my body image. Weighing in at 135 pounds, I feel fat. Even though this is a healthy weight, I feel that I should weigh 120 pounds to be healthy. It doesn’t matter that I actually feel physically better with the few more pounds. It doesn’t matter that some of the weight-gain is probably due to my hypothyroidism, which makes it more difficult for me to maintain a lower weight.

What is behind this? Why am I (and millions of other people) feeling fat when we really aren’t? There are – at least – two factors playing in here: The incessant equation of heaviness and laziness and of weight and health. The only reason people are overweight or obese is because they are lazy. At least that seems to be the message we’re feed (ha!) all the time. So, if I gain weight, it must be because I am too lazy to work out, too lazy to cook right, or to incompetent to manage my time well. As so often, this ignores the context: If you work 40+ hours per week and then commute an hour each way, well, guess what, you have either time to work out or to cook healthy or to get enough sleep. It amazes me that with all this talk about the obesity epidemic, no one seems to even hint at the connection between long work hours & commutes and our increasing waistlines. It couldn’t possibly be the situation that makes us fat! No, it has to be our laziness…

And then, of course, we are bombarded with the message that if we have some fat on our bodies, especially around the belly, we’ll die! Oh, my! As if we’d live forever if we didn’t have belly-fat… Yes, of course, there is a correlation between weight, activity level, and longevity. But it’s not nearly as clear-cut as we think it is. Plus, as Jennifer Michael Hecht points out so well, if we live longer but are miserable, why would we want to live longer? Which brings me to another question I have been pondering as I observe how I mentally rip into my fat-spots: How healthy can it be to feel guilty every time I eat something because it’s not the “right” thing (even eating an avocado comes with internal judgment because it’s higher in fat than other veggies)? How healthy can it be to feel bad about my body rather than accepting it? And could it be that I eat more because of these feelings? Do I really want to spend my life worrying about my weight or can I just enjoy it? Or do I really want to spend my life working out 2 hours a day? Well, if I had more time, I would probably walk much more.

So, I am struggling to find a middle ground. I like being active but I also like to spend my day reading and writing. I would like to be able to do that without feeling guilty. I want to learn to accept my body weight (actually, a friend of mine commented that I look better with a bit more weight and, when I feel balanced, I agree with her). I also want to use my own experience, though, to look deeper into the larger context, at the interconnections and the messages we’re getting. From a health perspective, it is good enough to walk briskly 30 minutes most days (or some similar activity). So, why do we think we have to do more than that? And, if this is so important, why don’t employers give us a work-out hour that we can spend being active in whatever way we choose (no, I don’t mean the lunch hour; an additional hour but one we’re being paid for!). Oh, that’s right: It’s an individual problem! If you gain weight you’re just lazy etc.

I am beginning to see two themes here: Lack of acceptance (and the guilt-feeling that comes with that) and the impact of our life-styles. Both have individual components and context/societal components: I can work on accepting my body but society could also quit sending me unrealistic messages. I can choose to reduce my work-hours but society could demand that employers quit demanding increasing hours.

After having hiked to Nevada Falls, I was glad that this hike took me on more level ground. Since I started out in Curry Village, I hiked probably about 2 miles to get to Sentinel Bridge, the starting point of this hike. Fortunately, the bridge is marked on the Valley map, so I had no trouble finding it. The hike starts out following a bike path along Southside Drive, which goes past the little Chapel. Once you are past the Chapel, the right opens up to a meadow with the first view of Yosemite Falls. Since this was my first time in Yosemite, I was unsure of many of the landmarks I encountered on my hikes. Fortunately, a photographer was by the roadside and more than happily confirmed my suspicion that I was watching Yosemite Falls in action.

Yosemite Falls as viewed from the southside of Yosemite Valley.

Shortly after this view, I headed across Southside Drive to the trail to Bridalveil Falls. The trail meanders along Southside Drive, sometimes (too) close to the road, sometimes further up. I am struck by the many boulder slides I encounter. It is hard to imagine that these huge rocks were once on the move. Yet, just the night before, I had heard a rock slide, mistakenly identifying it as a rain pour until I was set straight by a friend the next morning. I encounter only a handful of other hikers on this beautiful trail until I get closer to Bridalveil Falls.

Somewhere along the trail…

And then there is Bridalveil Falls! I realize that I am fascinated by falls. It seems like I tend to pick hikes to falls. Fed by Bridalveil Creek, this fall gets its name from the way the mists look when blown by the wind. Definitely stop by the Vista Point! It is well worth the extra trip.

Bridalveil Falls as viewed from the Vista Point.

We saw Bridalveil Falls again from Inspiration Point, to which my friend took me on our way back home. This picture is taken much later in the day…

Excited from the view of another impressive waterfall, I head to the parking lot in search of the trail that was supposed to lead me to Pohono Bridge, a bridge that I had not found on any of the maps I carried with me. No signs. I take a closer look at the Yosemite map I had printed out (Choose the Park Map). I could tell that there was a street that crossed Merced River close to Bridalveil Falls, which must be Pohono Bridge. So, if I would just walk up the street a bit I should get there. I knew from a sign close to the parking lot, that the bridge was slightly more than a mile away. I started out on the side of Southside Drive in the direction of the intersection where one part would lead me to the bridge. So I thought. It turned out that the exit from the parking lot is further on Southside Drive than the intersection. I headed toward the tunnel for about 20 minutes when I decided that there was no intersection this way and turned around. I found the intersection on my way back but decided to look for the trailhead some more because both roads were buzzling with cars. A meadow with view of Bridalveil had a sign to Pohono Bridge! Excited I followed the sign. Unfortunately, there was no indication of direction on the sign, which I found out was a major drawback. Twice. Frustrated with my three false starts, which caused me to add about 90 minutes of extra hiking or about 8km, I took a deep breath and headed toward what I hoped was the Pohono bridge on the road. As I was cursing the cars that were passing too close to comfort, I looked into the woods and I saw a trail! A bit leery of yet another trail leading me nowhere, I nevertheless decided to get out of cars’ way and take the trail. As long as the trail would stay close to the road and lead in the direction I figured the bridge should be, I would be okay. I was dancing for joy when I spotted a bridge! And I felt like I had won the lottery when I saw the sign on it: I had found Pohono Bridge. Oddly enough, I did not take a picture! I still don’t know where the trailhead is but the trail to the bridge, once I had found it, was very nice leading me through forest sometimes close to the Merced River. (Of course, two days after my hiking, I discover a hiking map that shows the Pohono Bridge: http://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/upload/valleyhikes.pdf).

Once I had crossed the bridge, I was supposed to follow signs toward El Capitan and Yosemite Village. Again, there were no signs. Deciding that I would take my chances with a trail that looked official and was heading in the right direction, I set off going East close to Northside Drive. About 10 minutes into this section of the hike, I had another view of Bridalveil Falls. The trail ended close to a controlled burn area. Fearful of more false starts, I decided to walk along the road, which is less traveled than Southside Drive. Shortly thereafter, I ran into three hikers who were looking for the trail to Pohono Bridge that I had just come. We commiserated over the lack of signs and shared stories of our false starts. Fortunately, since they had come the other way, they were able to point me toward a trail they had taken from Camp 4. With renewed energy, I set off on my search of the El Capitan trail. Again, I used sense of direction – and El Capitan itself – to lead my way since signs were scarce. Based on the maps I carried, I had decided the route I would take. I soon passed what I thought was Camp 4, excited that I might have time to stop at the Ansel Adams gallery my friend had recommended.

Fortunately for me, El Capitan is very visible – unlike the signs that are supposed to point out the trail leading to it.

The (barely visible) heart on El Capitan as seen from Inspiration point. Again, this picture was taken later in the day after driving there.

I had underestimated where I was. I kept looking for the trail on the map. Finally, I realized that the trail was sandwiched by the drive and the river. I hadn’t passed Camp 4. I was about half a mile West of it… By this time, I had no idea if I was on the trail I was supposed to take. But at least, I now knew where I was on the map. Even though that was further away from the end than I had thought, I no longer felt lost and enjoyed my surroundings again. After passing through Camp 4, the same pattern emerged: no trail signs but something looking like a trail, which I took since it roughly coincided with the trail on the Yosemite Valley map (Choose the Yosemite Valley map). I passed by a rock climber camp, fascinated to see about 40-50 people being trained in scaling these rocks. Soon, I saw the Yosemite Lodge and the number of people on the trail increased again. I decided to give up on Yosemite Village since it was close to 5 PM and I figured the Ansel Adams Gallery would be closed. Plus, my feet and legs were tired. I had mapped out a route along a self-guided trail that would lead me back to Sentinel Bridge. Figuring that I had more than covered 21km, I felt justified in abandoning the walk instructions, especially since I wasn’t sure I could find the trails they were leading me on (unfortunately, the map that came with the instructions was more than useless – my only complained about this hike!). The self-guided trail leads across a meadow back to Sentinel Bridge, the end point of the walk. The bridge provides another view of Half Dome, the bald giant of Yosemite.

The meadow along the self-guided trail that I took back to the hike starting point.

Yosemite Falls can be seen again from the self-guided trail.

Half Dome viewed from Sentinel Bridge.

After spending about 40km (or 25 miles) hiking in one day on two trails, most of it by myself, I was glad to reconnect with the others in the Half Dome group in Curry Village. Many of them had made it up Half Dome, some of them barely, others turned around at various points for various reasons. After some dinner, my friend and I headed back home to avoid traffic out of Yosemite on Sunday. Before we went home, he took me on a tour through Yosemite Valley, seeing some of the same sites I had hiked to earlier in the day. The drive culminated at Inspiration Point with its inspiring views.

The view of Yosemite Valley and beyond from Inspiration Point at about 7:30 PM on an early June day.

Nicely tired and full of wonderful images and experiences, we leave Yosemite driving into the sunset… Arriving back home totally exhausted after 3 1/2 hours of driving.