Hot August morning, 1984. Two-a-day practices in pads. Forty-yard wind sprints. The whistle blows. I blast out of my stance and feel a rusty hay hook stab through my upper-right quadricep. I didn’t tell the coach until after practice. He says, “Apply ice. But don’t leave it on. Rub it in circles, like this. You don’t want to burn the skin with ice.” He was trying to be helpful. He knew I was screwed for a week at least.

At the afternoon practice, it still hurt like hell. So I rubbed on that athletic grease with a thousand percent menthol in it that you can smell a block away. The greasy mentholated ointment went right under that pad on the quadriceps. By the time I got to the field, the skin under that pad was smoking. I didn’t need menthol. I needed heroin. Or at least a shade tree and a fishing pole. Something to help me chill, which was why I playing that stupid game in the first place.

That’s one of the reasons we are old farts doing martial arts. We need something to help us chill. And then we overtrain. And then you are reduced to hobbling about the house with a glass of iced tea and mumbling like Dean Martin nursing a hangover. And the recovery takes longer than a week like it did in high school. My last muscle pull happened at the Sunflower State Games in July. It finally healed the following April.

We would like to claim that all our injuries are from competition. But ninety percent of injuries occur from overtraining. And by overtraining, I mean ignorance. I blew my plantar fascia during class warm-ups, jumping rope. I walked it off a little bit and kept jumping. Felt like jumping on a barn spike. I didn’t know what a plantar fascia was. Ignorance.

Reading this article won’t cure ignorance. I recommend watching other old farts. My dad laid pipe until he was fifty-seven. I never saw him scramble up the wall of a ten-foot ditch like the young guys did. He had the operator lift him out in the excavator bucket. Dad’s operator could wipe a baby’s nose with a thirty-inch bucket. He was an old fart too. You could learn a lot from watching them work together.

When my dad was seventy, he decided to take it easy. So he got a semi and started pulling those twin-trailers for FedEx. Just day trips. Out and back. Between the front and back trailers is that set of wheels that joins the two. It’s pretty much dead weight– too heavy for a team of Shetland ponies. While I and the other young guys were grunting and grimacing to push it into place, Dad would take the extra time to place it just so with his tractor. It took skill and practice, but he could do it. I learned to do it, too. By watching him.

Information cures ignorance. Good information. When I blew my plantar fascia, Tessa’s uncle, an M.D., gave me a medical journal with the latest information on plantar fasciitis. You can read about that at this link. But the cure was what you might expect: rest and stretching. Drugs don’t help much.

If I wanted to make money at this website thing, I would recommend every herbal supplement dating back to ancient Babylon. They’re still out there, you know. And I would get, like, eight cents every time somebody clicked on the herbal supplement ad to cure plantar fasciitis, or whatever. But lies won’t make us any smarter. Neither will 1000% menthol. And lies won’t make us stop overtraining. There is no herbal supplement for plain old horse sense: If it hurts, stop.