Blog II: I Can't Touch My Toes
Tuesday, June 17th, 2025
As the title says, I cannot touch my toes. I mean, unless I bend my knees. But I feel like when people say "I can't touch my toes", they mean that they cannot do so without bending their knees. And that's me. I seriously am incapable of doing this, and have been incapable for as long as I can remember. Even as a child I couldn't reach -- and at 27 I'm no closer. I'm otherwise in fairly good health and relatively active (if you count city-walking a lot with the occaisonal hike or ski-trip peppered in for good measure). But I am maybe the stiffest person to ever walk the planet. Anyone who has ever attempted to give me a shoulder massage or back rub or even so much as touch that region of my body has then made some remark in shock as to just how stiff I was. I remember one time in college I was on an awful tinder date and the guy tried to give me a back massage and he simply could not get over the stiffness in my shoulders. My husband as well is often surprised just how quickly I reset to my factory default stiffness after he tries to ease the tension with a massage. I feel like a medical anomaly. There's no way I can be this stiff and healthy. And yet, I have near perfect bloodwork every single time. My energy levels are good, I sleep pretty decently. I really have no other health complaints. There was the chronic constipation and PMDD but fixing my posture and taking a suppliment fixed those things so the last real health improvement I have to make is to become flexible enough to touch my toes.
To that end, I am attending my first yoga class later today. Since moving I've found I have access to free community center lessons (and I can finally JOIN a gym if I so chose, as when I lived in Japan my tattoos barred me from basically every single gym in the country). I'm hoping I don't embarrass myself too much but then, there's something kind of fun about minor humiliations like not being able to touch one's toes or making a strange grunting sound upon assuming a difficult pose. In the long term, I want to start weight training and get kind of jacked. I yearn to feel physically robust, you see. Standing at roughly 150cm or so, I have a bit of a Napoleon-esque drive for power and consequently struggle to accept the fact that I'm a tiny, unathletic weakling... which is probably a bad thing. But what isn't a bad thing is trying to get into better shape. So um, that's what I'm gonna try to do. And I'm making a blog about it to kind of... set it in stone, so to speak. Perhaps I can hold myself accountable this way.
So, for documentation purposes, this is about as far as I can get before the tightness in my hamstrings stops me from grasping my piggly wigglies. I aspire to eventually post an image in a subsequent blog entry wherein I am successfully touching the toes. We will see... for now, have this:
