Jonathan R. Schmidt

Physiotherapy and Transrockies Video

I’ve been going to physiotherapy for over a month now and my knee is slowly getting better. The whole thing involves much more patience than I expected. I was thinking that I’d be healed up in about a month and back running. I was doing a good job of taking it easy until I played a soccer double header last Wednesday. From now on I’ll be relegated to playing keeper or sitting out. But, I want to do it right and so I will taking the next two months off from strenuous activity – one canoe trip being the exception. This will be super tough with the beautiful weather approaching, but perhaps I’ll just have to do more canoeing!

So to heal my running addiction I was looking back on the TransRockies run that Justin and I did last year. I browsed the photos from the various photographers again and realized that there’s some great photos of Justin and I from Sho Fujimaki, one of the independent photographers brought there for the week. I was bit disappointment that the official TransRockies photographers captured so few pictures of Justin and I, but Fujimaki’s make up for it I think. I written him with a request to purchase a few of his photos, they are pretty affordable at $5/each. Also, the TransRockies website now has a highlight video from last year’s run. Justin gets a very quick second on the camera as he splashes through a large puddle. So, although we don’t get much coverage, the video is a great summary of the five days of racing. Here’s the link: Transrockies video – http://www.transrockies.com/transrockiesrun/transrockies/video.htm
And if you need some proof that Justin and I were there here’s some of Fujimaki’s great photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/sebangou2

It’s confirmed, my knee has 2 parts

So it turns out from the x-rays that my left knee has bipartite patella – a condition where the two patella bones don’t fuse together during childhood development. The result is basically an extra little piece of bone at the top of the knee cap. Looks a bit funny if you stare at it for long, but otherwise it just looks like I have a knobby knee. Hopefully knowing this my physiotherapist can work more efficiently on treating my IT band injury and get me running again soon.

Bipartite Patella…you say I have a what?

So I’ve been getting physio for the last few weeks for my left knee. After a few weeks of taking it easy (no running or exercise) and lots of icing and physio exercises the prominent bump in my kneecap was still not going down. My physiotherapist seemed a bit perplexed and was looking into it more in-depth when one of the doctors walked by. He asked the doctor to have a look at my knee and immediately the doctor mumbled something that I now know to be ‘bipartite patella‘. Being not schooled in physiology all I picked up was ‘bi…. patella’ – “I have two (bi…) patella (kneecaps) – cool or maybe not so cool…that doesn’t seem like something that you want two of. Apparently it’s not something that you want two of, but it’s not that strange. It seems to occur in about 1% of the population and essentially is caused by two kneecap bones not fusing together during childhood development. I’m going to the doctor in a few days to see if I can get x-rays to prove if this is indeed the case. All in all it seems from my self-diagnosis, that I had a case of IT band injury from running that swelled up my kneecap and that may have been exacerbated by having a bipartite patella. It sounds like most diagnoses of bipartite patella are accidental, as the issue comes up from other injuries to the kneecap. Our bodies are truly amazing things, even though my kneecap possibly didn’t fuse together properly it’s not a big deal and I’ve been doing exercise all my life. I’ll just have to see what the x-rays show, maybe I just have knobby knees, which is what I’ve thought all along or maybe I’m part of the 1%? We’ll see what happens, at least I know some more Latin physiology terms.

Wildlife Video

The below video is actually a series of individually taken photos from a wildlife camera project I was working in. The still photos are taken from a motion-sensed camera. The cameras used for this montage were all monochrome cameras. The wind in certain areas was so prevalent that the cameras took pictures every second for sometimes hours. It was due to this phenomenon that the amazing cloud formations at the beginning of the montage were made possible. Essentially this is a summary of every still image taken during four months of data collection. I found it particularly enjoyable to put it together and add some music to spice it up.

On the techy side it wasn’t too difficult. Adobe Premiere allows you to bring in a series of still images if they are numbered stills in a sequence. So all I had to do was go into Adobe Bridge and batch rename the files so that they were all in a sequence. I could then bring them into Premiere as a video sequence and manipulate the speed of sequence and cut and splice. Because I wanted every single still image in the sequence and tried to keep it to 10 minutes the video moves rather quickly. Enjoy