Professional trail runner, Ashley Arnold contributed this story to the FootBalance blog:
While we know that sitting all day is bad for our body—our body just sort of shuts down from being too sedative—standing can also wreck havoc on us. Standing not only makes for tired feet and legs, but often times total body exhaustion.
According to FootBalance’s website, “Your feet are the foundation for your entire body. When this foundation is misaligned or functioning poorly the effects can be felt throughout the body, whether in muscle and joint pain or through more serious injuries.”
Last December, I took a hard fall and severely sprained my ankle five miles into The North Face Endurance Challenge 50-Mile Trail Race in the Marin Headlands just outside of San Francisco, California. It’s taken months to return to some amount of normalcy (perhaps this is partly due to the fact that I can’t actually bring myself to stop running completely), but still, just when I felt like I was finally noticing marked improvement, my ankle suddenly took a turn for the worse a couple of weeks ago. I noticed increased soreness, increased swelling and overall lower leg exhaustion at the end of every day. … So much so that I found myself struggling to get through even an hour run.
Interestingly, this happened at precisely the same time as a week when I was working back-to-back six-hour days at Dancing Colours Studio in Cabrondale, Colorado, a retail shop with hard wood floors, where I have to stand most of the time (with occasional bouts of round-the-store walking).
Most of that standing time, you should know, I was also wearing my absolute favorite (and completely unsupportive) shoes, Chuck Taylors. (After the day I’d end up with an elevated leg for the rest of the evening in an attempt to decrease my ankle and foot swelling so that I could wake up the next morning and run with slightly less pain.)
After a week of this nonsense, I finally came up with a solution: Insert my Dynamic Blue FootBalance footbeds into my Chucks. While the feeling of proper arch support in a skate shoe threw me off at first, my lower legs felt almost immediately less fatigued after the work day, and, the swelling wasn’t nearly as bad.
While I’m still elevating at the end of every day I stand around in the shop, the decision to add FootBalance footbeds to my shoes was perhaps one of the best things I’ve done for my body besides eat well and train hard. I’ve found my feet, legs and body are less sore, my runs are easier and I’m back on a road to a healthy foot and ankle.
