Hello everyone,
Recently I have become a lot more active, walking every morning 10km at a brisk pace. It started out great but soon big blisters would form and this has derailed my morning walks in some cases. The whole "no pain, no gain" mantra can only go so far before you do quite serious damage.
Some background - I am overweight, by a lot. I am 33 years old, 5,8" and currently 105.4km. I carry most of my weight in my gut and chest area. The walking has helped this quite a bit because as of this morning I am down 5kg from 110.4kg back on Aug 1st. My health took quite a big hit this last year, going back to September 2022 I was hospitalized with Alcoholic Hepatitis. My drinking had got to such an insane amount that it almost killed me, sadly this happened 2 more times since. I had just over 6 months sober but a lapse on a business trip resulted in another 2 month long bender which brought be right up to the end of May this year but, thankfully, I have been sober since, 3 months on Fri 25th Aug.
I give this background context to give you an understanding of the drive I have to become healthy. When this all first started to deteriorate and I had my first stint of sobriety for those 6 months I wasn't taking too much care of myself physically. I was still eating like crap and was barely exercising, in my mind I was still doing great as I wasn't drinking. This time around, with hindsight, I can see I clearly wasn't doing enough and not drinking, while still the most important, was only one piece of a puzzle for a healthier life.
Back to the blisters. As I said, was quite sedentary for quite some time, lots of weight building and soft feet getting softer lol. I have a lovely walk along a river here beside my house and can do just over 10km doing a loop. I had done this many times in the past and so back out I went to try again. I could just about do 5km before my feet were in a lot of pain as well as lots of shin splints pain. Long story short-ish, over a few days I built back up to 10km but the blisters started really coming on strong and becoming incredibly painful.
They were in awkward areas like right on the ball of the foot and the main fleshy part of my baby toes and the toe beside it. I didn't pop them and figured I would leave them just do their thing and heal. I have been using powder to keep my feet dry as well as using special socks with extra padding but not long into the walk they'd pop and once that happened quite a lot of the skin would start to fall away, looking more like a scalded burn than a blister. I have kept my feet clean, using antiseptic and then keeping my feet dry in the hopes they will just dry up and become tough and callusy. In this time, I have also taken a few days off to let them heal up a bit before going out and having them split open again. Seems to have helped.
I am wondering is there anything else I can do. I am using bandaids on each toe, making sure they are covered, using powder to keep my feet dry during the walk, I have a decent pair of shoes - asics, wondering is there anything else I should be doing. The irony of course being that my weight is pretty much the cause of this but to lose it requires the walking which causes the blisters lol
Am I right in thinking my feet will toughen up over time, is it a bad idea to do it this way as I might cause my feet more damage, any advice or your own experiences would be very much appreciated.
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