Parenting my inner child-athlete

There is a very high shelf in our kitchen where we keep the giant bowls that only my oversized partner uses. The shelf is the perfect height for him, but even though I’m also tall, I can barely reach it. One day I was putting dishes back from the dishwasher, and I stood on my tiptoes to put one of these mondo bowls back in its place, a motion I’ve done thousands of times before in my life.

But this time, as I rose up on my toes, a series of increasingly painful crackles snapped from the base of my foot halfway up my calf. I was afraid to go back down again, that I might have broken something just by taking my heels off the ground. I’ve never even heard of knuckle-type crackling in the general Achilles tendon area. What on earth? And more importantly, why on earth?