I am trying to find out why my son doesn't seem to be able to build endurance like most people can and why he has all the muscle aches. It isn't just the ankles. He says he gets a burning pain on the bottom of his feet when he does a lot of walking and pains in his lower legs and then has sore muscles for days afterward, so he probably associates walking with pain. No wonder he doesn't look forward to hiking. My son and I went walking with a group of older adults, most of them in their 60's. I am sure we walked over a mile or two, stopping to look at things along the way. My son was the only person in the group who needed to sit down when we stopped somewhere. He can't stand for long periods of time like most people and he hates to sit on the floor when everyone else is standing, but sometimes he has to do this. He gets as much exercise as I do and I don't have muscle aches and I can keep walking well after he gets to a point that he just can't walk any more.
A few days later, he still had muscle aches but he didn't want to keep taking Tylenol. He tried to play a song on the piano for his dad, a song that he played well earlier in the morning, but he kept making mistakes. I told him to go ahead and finish the song and he told me that I just didn't understand. It wasn't that he didn't want to play the song, he couldn't do it. He said his brain could not process everything it needed to process well enough to do it because his brain was dealing with the muscle aches, the sound from a television in another room that I could easily tune out, and various other things and he just couldn't do it at that moment. The next morning, when he was well rested, he played the same song on the piano without any problem.
