At 69 years old, David Boyes from North Manchester started life as an electrician before moving into becoming an IT manager for the NHS and then a building manager. Through his life he’s always loved to be active but when joint pain threatened he needed a solution.
This is David’s Story….
Up until my early 40s I was an electrician which as you can imagine is a job that very much keeps you on your feet all day. Being an electrician is a very physical job. I had to have an operation on my knee for what is known as Housemaid’s Knee (also known as prepatellar bursitis) where it locked on me. That was back in 2000. I decided to go to more deskbased jobs in IT and building management. I’ve always wanted to keep moving, having had a physical job I wanted to keep my fitness up when I stopped that.
So since my 40s I’ve been doing a lot of running in an attempt to stay fit and active. In 2012 I started doing Park Runs and I’ve done just shy of 300 of them over the years since.
This time last year I thought I had a groin strain from running. So I rested it for a few weeks but it wouldn’t go away. I went to see my doctor who put me in for an X-ray and physio and they straight away said, “it’s arthritis in your hip”. It wasn’t great news. It’s actually on the same side as my original knee operation so the two might have been related over the years.
I was in a programme having physio once a week for the hip pain and having a gym membership at the local gym. So I was looking for ways to manage the pain in order to keep moving in the hope it would help the hip pain. It was strange how the little things became a problem, like tying my shoelaces became a big ‘no, no’. More than anything it was a stiffness that was stopping me doing what I wanted.
One day I was in the chemist and noticed FlexiSEQ. I won’t deny the price nearly put me off but I thought “well, give it a go, if it works it will be worth it”. So I was using the FlexiSEQ and doing the exercise and the pain was much better. But I wasn’t sure if that was because of the exercise or the FlexiSEQ so I stopped using FlexiSEQ for a month and the pain came back. So that answered that question and I’ve been using it for the past 12 months. I use Subscribe & Save on Amazon so it arrives every month. It always arrives just as I’m running out which is great.
I’m now back to running again. I go on runs with some friends, they’re a bit more serious than me so it’s more training runs but we do about 3 or 4km. It’s not bad for someone in their late 60s, even if a lot of the people I run with are older than me. But it’s a fine line, if you don’t use it, you lose it. They say the chair is the biggest killer and I can well believe that. I mentioned to my physio that I’ve been using FlexiSEQ and she said to me, “Yeah, we’ve been hearing really good things about that.” We got talking to the rest of the group and it turned out a few of them were also using FlexiSEQ, none of them had a negative thing to say about it which is always good to hear. There were others who hadn’t heard about FlexiSEQ so us talking about it made them give it a go. There’s nothing better than word of mouth when it comes to a product.
The thing with arthritis is it’s not a life-threatening condition but it can become a life-changing condition if you let it. I’m glad I’ve found a way to keep doing what allows me to keep active.
