Day Six

I ran 1.8 km today, but on a running machine, in a gym, which is awfully disgusting really.  I hate gyms but can't run in the snow.  I fall just walking in the snow.  I have run for almost four years now, but always outside.  When I run outside I don't have earphones in my ears, so that I can hear the birds and the trees and my hooves pounding the ground.  But in a gym you have to have earphones, so I listen to my book, which makes it slightly more acceptable. 

Gyms are weird places.  (My son-in-law has a blog which started off the klapping-gym-boet term in South Africa in 2010, http://slicktiger.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/the-slicktiger-guide-to-klapping-gym-boet/ It is satirical, so please don't be offended by the language and some of the ideas if you read it.)  I have a kind of horror of gyms, but our local Y had a special free deal to have three sessions with a personal trainer to advise us on the kinds of exercise relevant to our age and to help us draw up a programme.  So we have been doing this for about five weeks now, lifting weights, doing stretches, running, rowing etc.  It makes you feel good to think you are doing something positive for your old age. It is just odd that I have to fulfill this in a gym, a place, it seems to me, full of strange men lifting weights and watching themselves in the mirror, and germs.

The kind of instructions you find in women's magazines that I loathe (the instructions and the magazines).  If I am told I am doing something wrong I am immediately a rebellious teenager again and will definitely not comply.

So the natural thing for today is what I ran on this morning, the human foot, or feet. Apparently our feet evolved after our hands, and the reason they think this is because when researchers stimulated the finger-pads of apes' hands, the neural network mapped each finger to a separate location in the brain, whereas when toe-pads are stimulated they go to one location.  With humans, the hands react the same way as apes, but when our toe-pads are stimulated, the four smaller toes correspond to one location, and the big toe, used for balance and walking upright, has its own location.  So with this research comparing the brains of apes and humans, scientists have reasoned that our feet evolved after we diverged from apes.

In South Africa we go barefoot a lot of the time, and here in the north-eastern US,  in summer the pads of my feet are still hard enough to walk quite happily on a beach, with everyone around me leaping about from the pain of the hot sand.  In winter my feet miss the air.  It is so cold that I wear warm boots most of the time.  Only in bed do my feet get to breathe and be naked.

My sons have huge boats of feet, they take size 12 and 13 shoes!  My mother had neat feet with toes that angled in a perfect line from the big to the pinkie-toe.  I always rather liked the shape of my feet until I went to a reflexologist once (as a favour to her as she needed patients/clients on whom to practice), who asked me if my feet had always been so odd, with strange bumps and irregular toes, and such obviously different sizes, the two feet are not symmetrical.  It was rather shocking and I went home and stared at them often, wonderingly.  Eventually I grew to love them again, and now I am very proud of their almost 4 year running career.

I couldn't find a drawing of my feet, although I have done a few, so here is one by my daughter, a beautiful pastel portrayal of her own feet, done a long time ago, just after we had arrived in America. She also has perfectly angled toes like her grandmother.