Ballet After An Injury

Tonight is back to ballet!
I ended up in the advanced class, since that was the only class that fit my work schedule. I'm always apprehensive about joining the advanced class, since well, I'm far from advanced. The barre is never bad, or the port a bras and adagio, but when it comes to the allegro, boy, I know when I'm beat (sometimes literally! My beats have always been on the poor side.)
It's been since May when I last donned a pair of pointe shoes, and it was a rough summer. Early June I dropped a heavy glass reed diffuser on my right sandaled foot. The result was a soft tissue injury that still has not healed properly. I was in a soft cast for five days, wore a walking boot (very sexy, I know), and currently wear an ankle compression sleeve. Some days are good, some are not (like when Hurricane Irene blew through CT, I woke up in the night with awful pain.) I will follow up next week with a post on soft tissue injuries.
I spent almost an hour on Monday night sewing my ribbons and elastics on my new pointe shoes, which I'd had since Easter. Since I'm so tall (5'10") and have a rather large foot for a ballet dancer (9-9 1/2), getting a new pair of pointe shoes was hard. The combination I needed for my Gaynor Mindens does not exists (Gaynor sizing runs large, so I needed an 11 combination) so I had to settle for the closest thing. And no way was I going to get a traditional pointe shoe.
After my ribbons and elastics were sewn and I had put on my padding, I went to our kitchen to try them out. And there was pain. Pain, which I'm hoping is coming from the fact that they are new pointe shoes and not pain from my injury. I also forgot that while Gaynor Mindens don't need the "breaking in" that a traditional pointe shoe does, they still need to form to your foot.
Tonight will be a test in several ways: see how much strength my feet and ankles have lost over the summer, see if that injury will cause a problem, and see if I can keep up!
Dancingly, Jenn
jenn@centralctfootcare.com
Dr Tina Boucher, Dance Podiatrist