Movementwise journeys

Join us around the fireside and listen to stories from those who have been on MovementWise Journeys and discover how you can overcome pain, injury and disease to do things in your life you may currently believe impossible.

Nine months ago I was in grave danger of never leading an active life again. Although only 54, I was beginning to feel old. My body often creaked and ached. Some days I could leap out of bed whilst others I crawled, clutching on the bedside table for support as I swung my feet to the floor. I was in a dark hole of despair. Then I met Tania Cotton, a movement analyst and physiotherapist who together with her team at Movementwise, has me 9 months later back to living my life to the full.

I should say that the start of my journey was when I went to see the consultant about my sore hip, but that wasn't the case. The start was actually three years later after a hip arthroscopy, a failed meniscus repair on my knee and then a second meniscus operation on the same knee.  By then I had gained a lot of weight. I couldn't walk up a mountain, walk up or down stairs, carry the shopping in from the car, walk the dogs, lift my suitcase into an overhead locker on the plane and I certainly couldn't ski.

As you know I live in the mountains. My view from my living room window is of the Mont Blanc Massif. I can read the weather by the clouds that sit upon the top of the glacier opposite my house. The seasons change before my eyes with the trees shedding their summer coats going from green to brown to bare in a matter of weeks.

When Tania mentioned that I needed the courage to do things differently, I had no concept of how differently things had to be done. What I wasn't aware of until the start of my Movementwise journey is that all my injuries were self-inflicted. Unwittingly, but self-inflicted nonetheless.

So much of what I have achieved on my Movementwise Journey has been as a result of 2 key factors: 1) that I felt understood, not as an injury, but as a whole person in the context of my life; 2) that I was supported by a team of professionals who helped put me back on the right track. In this day and age with so much choice on the internet, it can feel overwhelming, and impossible to know who to turn to. And the danger is that we end up doing nothing.

The day I came out of hospital on crutches for the third time in two years, I sat on my bed and cried. The frustration of not being able to get dressed on my own, not being able to get in the shower on my own, or even carry a cup of tea across the room was too much. As I sat there feeling sorry for myself, Tania ‘phoned me and told me that I would be up and about in no time at all, walking up mountains by the summer and skiing by Christmas. “That is absolutely impossible” I thought.

It is understood that as we get older, we age. We start to need glasses for reading the newspaper; we ask people to repeat themselves as our hearing starts to fade; we eventually expect to walk with a cane; to get arthritis in our joints and become bent over and hunched. We are however limiting ourselves with these beliefs.

Rightly or wrongly I have spent most of my life thinking of others. I think it is a generational thing and probably also the way we were raised. We were taught to offer the plate of food to others at the table before we helped ourselves, to share our toys no matter how precious, to do the chores before we were asked, to anticipate the problem before it had arisen.

Over the past 18 months I have set myself Movementwise Milestones. These are challenges, some big and some small, for me to aim for along my recovery road. One huge milestone that I wanted to do was to walk the Tour du Mont Blanc - a 10 day, 170 kilometre walk around the Mont Blanc massif passing through parts of Switzerland, Italy and France, carrying my backpack and staying in refuges along the way.

Life is a long journey and for one reason or another, at some time or other, we may find ourselves heading down the wrong path of physical recovery. It may be a path of quick fixes and promised instant results, or self-neglect and resignation. It takes courage to retrace our steps and take a new direction. In my case, I was heading down the path of resignation.