Before beginning the Walk, I didn’t even know what plantar fasciitis was. After a good 500 miles on the road, I had a pretty intimate understanding of PF. Walking the long miles, day after day, with 40-50 lbs on my shoulders, was taking its toll. When Lindsay, a kind host in Ukiah, CA, offered to massage my feet, she didn’t await my answer as she instantly grabbed my left foot into her healing hand, and I about screamed in pain from an ultra-sensitive foot-bottom.
To alleviate my furious foot pain, I integrated a variety of helpful measures into my daily routine, such as learning to walk more softly and smoothly, a practice I developed over the course of many fixed-focus days walking through Silicon Valley, the weight of the backpack on my shoulders the entire time. I also expanded the quantity, type and duration of stretches I was doing daily. Though I’d consider such measures abundantly helpful in that they kept the PF from getting worse, the original PF pain never did go away. Coming home for the summer of 2010 would be more than enough time for the PF as well as other pains (hips, back, neck) to completely subside.
I was only half right. At the end of the summer, when the Walk reached its one-year anniversary, my back felt vastly better, but some hip pains still existed, and the PF, though better, was still very noticeable– especially in the morning. The prospect of walking thousands more miles with such pain was scary, so I wasn’t about to rush back to the road. And this worked in my favor.
Doing volunteer work, meditating, and visiting friends in California during the month of November, I told Brandon Bert, founder of Amazing Grass, who’s been a top-notch awesome sponsor of green superfoods, protein and energy bars to the Walk, that I’d be more than happy to spend some time volunteering at their booth during San Francisco’s Green Festival.
At the Green Festival, a favorite event for me, I met Amy, who worked with marketing AG products. As Amy and I were engaged in conversation, she learned of my PF pains, and told me that as a runner, she’d experienced more than her fair share of PF pains as well. Amy is a nutritionist, and was, but was told that fish oils would wipe out her PF. She decided to try them, and within a week, her PF problems had all but vanished.
Listening to Amy, my ears were as tall and as wide open as they could possibly be. Though I call myself vegetarian, I typically expose myself to a bit of fish a couple of times per year– a practice I began in late 2006, when I knew I’d be doing some extensive travelling through Latin America, and not always be able to learn of all ingredients in any given dish being served to me. Sudden exposure to meat will (after years without) will make a vegetarian sick– something I’d learned before. But, exposing myself to a tiny bit of animal bacteria every few months seemed to keep my body prepared. As such, though still a “vegetarian,” I decided to give fish oil pills a try. They worked. After over a year’s worth of painful PF-ridden steps, the inflammation had all but disappeared, within about a week’s time.
Not only was I close to returning to Texas with soon-to-be-realized ambitions of pushing the heavy pounds of my backpack in a cart, I’d also be armed with fish oil pills, which splash an enormous bucket of water on any painful PF inflammation that would ever dare threaten me again.
