Seaside Strolls

I used to run.

Not marathons — I was never that person. But three miles along the waterfront in Portland on my lunch break, rain or not, headphones in, legs eating the pavement while my brain worked through whatever code problem I'd been stuck on all morning. Running was my compiler. If I couldn't solve it at the desk, I'd solve it at mile two. My body was a machine I used to think.

I don't run anymore. I haven't in two years. The last time I tried was October 2023, six months after diagnosis, and I made it a quarter mile before my hips turned into two bags of broken glass and my knees sent signals that my brain interpreted as "we would like to stop being knees now." I walked home. I didn't try again.

This article is about walking. Not running. Not hiking. Not exercise in the way that word gets used by people who have never had their body veto their plans for the day. Walking, slowly, on sand, with a dog who doesn't care how far we go, near water that doesn't care either.

The Bench at Governor Patterson

There's a bench at Governor Patterson Memorial State Recreation Site, about a mile south of Waldport on 101. It sits maybe forty feet above the beach, looking out at the Pacific, with a path down to the sand that's steep enough to make me think twice on bad days and fine on good ones. The bench has no plaque. It's just a bench. It's become my most important piece of furniture.

I walk to the bench. I sit. I watch Kona investigate whatever the tide left. I assess. Can I do the path today? What's the sand like — dry and soft, which is harder, or wet and packed, which is easier? Where's the pain? Hips, knees, feet, back — the daily roll call, every joint checking in like employees at a morning standup, most of them already filing complaints.

Some days I stay on the bench. That's fine. The view is the same. The salt air is the same. Kona comes back up the path and puts her chin on my knee and the sand on her nose transfers to my jeans and I don't care because she's warm and the ocean is right there and I got dressed and drove here and that's enough.

Other days I go down. And the sand changes everything.

When the Ground Talks Back

Here's something nobody told me about fibromyalgia: it ruins your relationship with the ground.

ProprioceptionYour body's sense of where it is in space — the ability to know where your feet are without looking, to adjust balance automatically, to walk without thinking about walking — the body's GPS — depends on signals from your joints, muscles, tendons, and the soles of your feet. Those signals go to the cerebellum, which processes them and adjusts your posture, balance, and gait in real time. You don't think about it. It just works¹.

Unless it doesn't.

Fibromyalgia scrambles proprioceptive input. Studies have found that fibro patients show reduced balance, altered gait patterns, and impaired postural control compared to healthy controls². The mechanism isn't fully understood — it may be that the same central sensitization that amplifies pain signals also distorts position signals, or it may be that chronic pain makes the muscles tense and the joints stiff, which garbles the feedback. Either way, the ground doesn't talk back clearly anymore. Or it talks back too much, about the wrong things.

I feel this as clumsiness. Bumping door frames. Misjudging curb heights. Reaching for a mug and overshooting. My body has a vague uncertainty about where it ends and the world begins, and on high-pain days that uncertainty expands until I'm walking through my own house like it's a maze I haven't memorized.

Sand changes the conversation.

Walking on sand — particularly wet packed sand — provides more sensory input per step than flat ground. The surface yields slightly under your foot, activating more pressure receptors across the sole. The instability is mild — not "balance beam" unstable, but "your ankle has to work a little harder" unstable. A 2023 study in the Journal of Clinical Medicine found that 12 weeks of sand-based exercise improved plantar-flexion strength, ankle flexibility, and balance in older adults³.

What I notice: on sand, my feet wake up. The constant, low-grade numbness that lives in my soles — the fibro baseline, always there, like wearing socks made of static — recedes. Not because the pain decreases, but because the sensory input increases. The signal-to-noise ratio shifts. More signal, same noise, and suddenly the ground is talking back in full sentences.

The Sand Math Ken Did at Midnight

Ken found a paper about energy expenditure on sand versus firm ground and got so excited he woke me up. It was 11:30pm. I was asleep, which for me is rare and valuable and not something you interrupt without consequences. Samba, who had been asleep on my feet, gave him a look that could curdle milk.

"Walking on sand uses 1.6 to 2.5 times more energy than walking on a hard surface at the same speed," he said, standing in the bedroom doorway with his laptop like a kid who found a bug in the garden and needs you to see it right now⁴.

"That's great," I said. "Go away."

But he's right, and it matters, and here's why: for someone with fibromyalgia, "more energy" doesn't mean "harder workout." It means "you get the same benefit in less distance."

Six hundred feet of walking on sand — that's about two football fields, barely a stroll by anyone's measure — may provide the same muscular engagement as a quarter mile on pavement. For a body that can't do a quarter mile, six hundred feet of sand is a real option. It's not nothing. It's not a consolation prize. It's physics working in your favor for once.

Six Hundred Feet

I measure my walks now. Not with a fitness tracker — I took that off in March 2024 because watching the step count compare to my old numbers was a form of self-harm I didn't need. I measure by landmarks.

From the bottom of the path at Governor Patterson to the first big rock: about 300 feet. To the log pile where Kona likes to check for crabs: 600 feet. To the stream outlet where the sand gets dark and wet: 900 feet. To the kelp line on a good minus tide: 1,200 feet, and that's a victory lap.

Most days I make the log pile. Kona and I stand there, she examines the kelp with forensic intensity, I breathe, my hips negotiate with the rest of my body about whether we're turning around or pressing on. Sometimes we press on. Sometimes we don't.

The walk back is always longer. Gravity and pain work in the same direction going down the beach — forward momentum helps. Coming back, both are against you. I've learned to time it so I turn around when the pain is at a 5, because the return trip will add a point. Turn at 6, arrive back at 7, and I've overdrawn the account.

Kona Sets the Pace

Kona is the worst walking partner and the best one.

Worst because she has no concept of pace. She goes from full stop — nose buried in sand, completely committed to whatever dead thing she's found — to full sprint in a direction she hasn't communicated. She zigs. She circles back. She finds something urgently interesting, investigates for thirty seconds, and abandons it with the attention span of a browser with too many tabs open.

Best because she has no concept of pace. She doesn't care if we walk six hundred feet or six. She doesn't track distance. She doesn't look at me with that "are we really stopping already?" face that running partners used to give me in Portland. She stops when something smells good. She stops when I stop. She's matched to the moment, not the mile.

A dog on a beach is a permission slip. To walk slowly. To stop randomly. To turn around for no reason other than your body said so. To stand still and look at the water and not call it "resting" because "resting" implies you were doing something and stopped, and sometimes just standing on the sand is the whole activity.

The Body That Grips

My physical therapist said something last year that lodged in my brain like a splinter: "Your body grips everything."

She was talking about protective muscle guardingWhen muscles stay partially contracted to protect an area the nervous system perceives as threatened — even when there's no injury — wasting energy and creating secondary pain. In fibromyalgia, the nervous system perceives threat everywhere, so the muscles respond by staying partially contracted. All the time. Shoulders up, jaw tight, core braced, hands half-fisted, feet gripping the ground⁵. It's like wearing invisible armor that weighs nothing and costs everything.

I didn't notice it until she pointed it out. I was lying on her table and she said "let your shoulders drop" and they dropped two inches. Two inches of contraction I wasn't aware of, burning energy 24/7, feeding back into the pain cycle because tired muscles generate their own distress signals and those signals feed the alarm.

Walking on sand — specifically wet sand, the compact kind near the waterline — does something to the grip. The surface gives, slightly, with each step. The feet can't grip the way they grip tile or concrete. The muscles in the arch and ankle have to adjust in real time instead of locking into a position and holding. It's forced micro-relaxation. The foot grips, the sand gives, the foot releases, the sand supports.

After beach walks, my calves are looser. My ankles have more range. My feet feel like feet instead of clubs. The effect lasts maybe three hours. Then the grip returns, because the alarm system doesn't take the day off.

But three hours is three hours. And I'll take three hours of feet that feel like feet over zero hours, every time.

What Walking Actually Is Now

Walking used to be the thing that happened between where I was and where I was going. A function call — input location A, output location B, walking was the runtime. I didn't think about it. My body handled it in the background the way it handled breathing and blinking and all the other silent operations that healthy bodies run without credit.

Walking is foreground now. It's the main process. The destination is secondary — usually a pile of driftwood logs or a bench or the spot where Kona found a dead crab last week and wants to check if it's still there (it is). The point is the walking. The sand under my feet. The ankle adjustments. The proprioceptive conversation between my soles and the ground. The way the ocean sounds different from down on the beach than from the car — closer, bigger, less romantic, more real.

I walk slowly. Kona walks erratically. Together we cover maybe a third of a mile on a good day, and most of it is spent stopping. Stopping to look at something. Stopping because my hip asked. Stopping because Kona found kelp that requires her immediate attention.

Ken joins us sometimes. He walks beside me and doesn't match my pace because he's thinking about something — I can tell by his hands; when he's processing a paper, his right hand moves like he's turning pages that aren't there. Samba doesn't join us. Samba is at home, doing important cat things, and she would like it noted that sand is an offensive substance that gets in the carpets.

Six hundred feet. Two football fields. A walk that my old body wouldn't have counted as a walk.

My new body counts it. And the sand counts it. And Kona counts it, though her count includes two sticks, one dead crab, and an unidentified piece of rope that she found very suspicious.

We go back Thursday.