It is the frustration of someone who can see clearly, analyse accurately, and describe with precision — and still find that the body is not responding as the analysis suggests it should.
That has been June.
I have kept records. I have moved daily. I have tracked sessions, mapped sensations, followed threads. And I have kept arriving, with remarkable consistency, at the same unresolved territory. The right inguinal fold. The L1–3 complex. The left quadriceps that judders under partial load as if the muscle is simply not receiving the signal cleanly. The forefoot stiffness that runs across both feet behind the middle toes, sore to pressure, tight when manipulated, occasionally producing what feels like the electrical complaint of a trapped nerve. The core that does not hold, no matter what I do to build it.
I have thought of myself, during this month, as a vintage car. Fix one thing and something else develops a rattle. Get the carburettor sorted and the exhaust starts singing. There is always something. And underneath the something, always, the same structural questions.
What I have come to understand — slowly, and only because the circling eventually made the pattern undeniable — is that I have been applying the right methods to the wrong problem. Or rather: to a problem that has layers I cannot reach from the outside alone.
Three things are tangled together, and the tangle is the difficulty.
The first is the statin reaction. I ceased statins in late January or early February — I failed to log the exact date, which is itself a small lesson in the value of recording what feels unremarkable at the time. Four to five months on, some residual myopathy may remain, particularly in the quadriceps, which were most severely affected. But at this distance, the statins are less likely to be carrying the full explanatory weight. Something else is contributing.
The second is the fascial injury at the right inguinal fold, sustained during the angioplasty closure device failure last year. I have known about this. I have mentioned it in recordings. What I had not fully reckoned with until this month is that every movement pattern I am trying to rehabilitate passes through that junction. It is not surprising that nothing downstream is responding as expected. The signal is being interrupted at source.
The third is the older cerebellar inheritance — the vestibular instability, the proprioceptive asymmetry on the left side, the compensatory holding patterns distributed across the neck and hips. These predate the angioplasty. They are the background against which everything else is playing.
Self-directed practice is necessary. It is not sufficient.
A physiotherapy appointment with Isi — a specialist working with climbers and outdoor athletes — is now booked for July. I am bringing to that appointment something I did not have in May: a month of precise somatic observation that locates the presenting pattern clearly. The quadriceps juddering under partial load. The referred sensation from tapping behind the kneecap travelling to the three middle toes. The fascial tension pulling across the iliac crest into the right groin. These are not vague complaints. They are a clinical picture, assembled from the inside.
July also brings a course correction in the practice itself. The 28-day streak is paused and will restart with clearer eyes about what Phase 1 actually requires. I am returning to foundational movement — informed partly by Katy Bowman's work on primal movement patterns and what modern sedentary life removes from the body — alongside the Qigong that remains the project's core. This is not a retreat. It is a more accurate map.
The insight that precipitated this shift arrived not from analysis but from the body itself, on a Saturday morning, whilst sitting on a sofa that has been quietly compressing the hip musculature for months. The legs, as if in response to a question the mind had been turning over, simply called.
I went and sat on the floor.
That is where July begins.