A Travel Day is a Good Day to be Sore

It's been two days since CKL and I had our Cahokia-Forest Park-City Museum day in Saint Louis. My inner thighs are still sore.

I knew there was some discomfort in my future when I looked up into the soaring, twisting play structures at City Museum. We'd already climbed 165* stair-steps that day, and I'd been mildly sore after the Houston Space Center tour. That only involved 119** steps.

But there were multi-story spiral staircases, tubes, hollow trees, pits, and tunnels, all for people to climb around, under, and in. I wasn't going to let a little thing like guaranteed future soreness keep me from playing in those amazing structures!

An hour later and several tubes, tree, pits, tunnels and spiral staircases later, my inner thigh buckled. We were climbing down the giant stairs in the parking lot fortress. It only hurt going down. After I finished that climb and walked around a bit, I discovered that upstairs wasn't bad at all. There were slides almost everywhere, which pretty much took care of down. No reason to stop our fun yet. So we explored until I squatted down and couldn't get back up. Then we skipped the nifty-spaceship-looking-metal-structure and went for lazy, tasty frozen custard instead.

Yesterday continued with me being able to squat, but not being able to get up again. But this time there was some actual pain too. According to the thigh anatomy charts I looked at, my Nemesis--the inner thigh muscle right above my knee--is called Vastus Medialis. It whines and whimpers every time I go downstairs. But hey... it's much better than yesterday. Yesterday, it shrieked and howled.

The lesson here? Other people might say it's something like, "Everything in moderation."

Or even, "Work out more."

I'll think about that one. But for now, I'm going with, "Hey, if you have to overdo it, plan to have an enforced rest period the next day."

Seems to be working for me.


*What can I say? I like data. In the absence of a tour guide to provide a monologue, I was making up my own. And tour guides should provide good data.

**See above re: good data. The Houston Space Center tour guide told us how many steps there were on the tour, and I wanted to see if she was right (No, but she was only two off. And, yes, I doublechecked my math. There were two opportunities to count each staircase. Up and down.)

*** Gratuitous bonus note: When we were up in the observation platform at the Arch, the Ranger told the blind lady that it was a very uncrowded day, and that he'd be surprised if there were more than 20 people up there. If anyone had told him, he would have been surprised. There were 27 people, counting Park employees. Well, 28 total creatures, if you counted the seeing eye dog. Which I did.