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My hiking group is doing the Magaliesberg this weekend. I told them I had a family thing. I don't. I used to lead that hike. We've done it every Easter for nine years. Eight kilometres up to the saddle, picnic at the top, eight back down. The view of Hartbeespoort dam from up there is the kind of thing that makes you remember why you live in this country. I lied because I cannot do that hike anymore. My right hip would lock up before the first kilometre marker. I lied because I cannot watch my friends do it without me. I cannot stand on the WhatsApp group seeing the pictures come in on Sunday afternoon and put a heart emoji on them like I'm celebrating something I'm part of. I am 49. I have started using the past tense to describe myself. I used to hike. I used to run the Comrades half. I used to be the one organising the Friday morning trail at Klapperkop. I have noticed I am doing this and I cannot stop. It is not the pain that scares me. The pain I have learned to manage. What scares me is who I am turning into. The boring version of me. The version I would have pitied at 35. Hennie has stopped asking if I want to come on the Saturday cycle with the boys. He used to ask every week. He stopped about four months ago. I have tried. A physiotherapist in Lynnwood. Six sessions, R650 each. She told me my glutes weren't firing. She gave me clamshells and bridges. I did them religiously for two months. The hip pain didn't change. Two cortisone injections from an orthopaedic surgeon in Hatfield. The first bought me five weeks. The second lasted nineteen days. A R3,200 set of insoles from a podiatrist in Brooklyn. Helped for about a month. The pain came right back through them. A Theragun. R8,500. Loosens the muscle for two hours, then back to baseline. Compression shorts from Sportsmans Warehouse. Useless above 1km. Stretches my niece sent me from a German YouTube physiotherapist. Sometimes makes it worse, sometimes nothing. I cannot tell. Four different doctors in the last year. Two suggested I "just take it easier". One suggested antidepressants. The fourth said I might need a hip replacement in five years. I left her practice and cried in the car for forty-five minutes before I could drive home. I have spent close to R22,000 on this. I have not added it up. I do not want to add it up. Three weeks ago Hannah came home from UCT for the long weekend. She wanted to walk to the Voortrekker Monument from her grandparents' place in Groenkloof. About three kilometres. Mostly downhill on the way out, uphill on the way back. I made it to the monument. I could not make it back. We waited for a Bolt for forty minutes and Hannah held my hand on the back seat. She is twenty-one years old. She didn't say anything. That was the worst part. The way she didn't say anything was worse than anything she could have said. The next weekend I drove to my friend Cobus's place in Magaliesburg for the boerie they were having for his wife's birthday. Cobus is a chiropractor in Krugersdorp. Sixty-three years old. Still cycling 100km a week. He saw me come in and asked me what was going on. He could see the shift in my walk from the way I came up the front stairs. We sat on the stoep with a beer and he drew me a diagram in his notebook. The hip joint. The muscles. The sciatic nerve. Four arrows feeding into each other. "Suzanne, listen. Hip pain isn't a single problem. It's a four-stage cycle. The muscles guard the joint, the guarding cuts off blood flow, the lack of blood traps inflammation, the trapped inflammation triggers more guarding. Round and round, twenty-four hours a day, for as long as the loop has somewhere to spin." "Every single thing you've tried only hits one stage of that loop. The injections numb the inflammation but the muscles keep guarding. The Theragun loosens the muscles for an hour but the blood flow doesn't come back. The insoles support the structure but don't reach the deep tissue. None of them break the cycle. They can't." Then he said the thing I have been turning over in my head ever since. "The reason your body has stopped letting you hike isn't because you're getting older. It's because for the last sixteen months your body has been practising the shape that hurts. Every time you twist in your chair to avoid the pain. Every time you lean weight onto your left leg standing in the queue. Every time you sleep curled up. You are training your body, hundreds of times a day, to default to that shape. The aging didn't do this. The avoidance did." Cobus is sixty-three and still riding 100km a week. The age was not the issue. He told me about his closest cycling friend, a guy called Johan Marais. 56. Had been in his Tuesday cycle group for fourteen years. Had to quit cycling entirely two years ago because of his right hip. Was on the surgery list for a hip replacement at Mediclinic Sandton. His ortho had told him to make peace with the idea that he wouldn't ride long-distance again. "Johan was further down the road than you, Suzanne. He's the one who brought this thing into my practice eight months ago. He's been back on the Tuesday ride for six. He's cancelled the surgery." He told me about a wearable belt Johan had brought him. Heat, compression, vibration, red light. All four at the same time, in one fifteen minute session. I drove home that Sunday and didn't order it for the rest of the week. The R22,000 graveyard was the reason. Every product on that list had a person attached to it telling me it was going to be different this time. What got me to actually click was a Saturday morning. The hiking group's pictures came in on the WhatsApp at 11:43am. They were at the saddle. Tracy had her arm around someone whose face I couldn't see. I put down my phone and went to the kitchen and ordered the belt from my laptop standing at the counter. It arrived three days later. I tried it that Sunday night on the couch. Heat. Vibration. Compression. A faint red glow. Fifteen minutes. I took it off, walked to the bedroom, got changed. I felt nothing. Honestly. I told Hennie it had been like sitting next to a heater for fifteen minutes. I went to bed thinking R1500 well-spent on a slightly fancier heating pad. Day five I walked from my house in Waterkloof to the corner café and back. Just over a kilometre. I had not made that walk in seven months. Day twelve Hennie suggested we walk in the Botanical Gardens on a Saturday morning. I said yes. We walked for an hour. He held my hand the whole way. Day twenty I went on a four kilometre route around Groenkloof on my own at sunrise. I haven't done a sunrise walk in over a year. Day thirty Hennie asked me on the Friday night if I wanted to come on the Saturday cycle. I said no, I'd walk instead. He paused at the door before he left and said "I haven't asked you that in four months, Suzanne. You realise that." I did. I had been counting. Last Saturday I told Tracy I was coming on the Magaliesberg hike. We did the easier trail, four kilometres, not the saddle. I made it. I had to take it slowly. But I made it. Tracy hugged me at the top and we both cried. I am not back to leading the eight kilometre hike yet. I am not running the Comrades half. I do not know if I will get all the way back there. But I am not the woman who lies about a wedding to avoid the WhatsApp group anymore. I am not Hannah's mother who couldn't make it back from the monument. If Cobus had not pulled out his notebook on that stoep five weekends ago, I would still be using the past tense. I would have started saying yes to the antidepressants instead of the questions. I'm not going to tell you this is going to give you your trail back. I don't know what you've already tried. If you have been doing the same. If your hiking boots are in a cupboard you don't want to open. The page below is what Cobus showed me. https://archify.co.za/pages/new-breakthrough-in-hip-health Suzanne