cimorene

I'm not a stranger to cramps in the arch of my feet! That's part of the reason that I stopped wearing high heels. I wore some knee-high leather boots that came to just below the knee as a young woman, shortly after the year 2000, usually in the fall and winter (purchased in the US, before moving to Finland was on my radar, so they were kind of for warmth but in a climate that wasn't cold enough to necessitate purchasing actual winter boots). They only had like a 2-3" heel, a chunky one, as was fashionable at the turn of the millennium, so they weren't a challenge to balance or particularly uncomfortable for ordinary walking around. But I soon noticed the pattern of cramps in the arch of my foot after days when I wore them, and that made me want to stop.

But I haven't had much of that problem since then. I don't have flat feet, and I rarely wear shoes without any arch support. (Snow boots, Timberlands and Solovair/Dr Martens type boots in the winter; Vans or Onitsuka Tiger sneakers most of the year with a brief appearance of Birkenstocks and suede slip-on moccasins in the summer, but our summers aren't universally warm enough for those.) However, just in the last few years I've occasionally noticed a twinge or mini-cramp that goes away after a few seconds specifically in the arch of my left foot. It's never lasted beyond a moment or two until like... last week once when I was walking up the stairs and then yesterday in the grocery store, when it suddenly twinged so hard into a cramp that I spent a minute and a half limping and whispering "Ow, ow, ow!" until it subsided.

It doesn't have to be caused by age, of course, but I don't know what else could have caused it, unless it is protesting the fact that I have not been walking enough in the last year. I used to have a tennis-sized hard rubber ball to roll on the arch of my feet, when I was working on my feet a lot in retail. But I can't remember where I put it.