Every sport seems to come with occupational hazards.

Take baseball. Baseball pitchers tend to end up with gimpy, arthritic elbows.

Take football. Football players can end up with rickety, rocky knees.

Take ballet. Ballet dancers almost always end up with the most gnarled, nobbed, ugly stumpy feet you can imagine. In fact, once you've seen a dancer's unslippered foot, you can never watch the grace and beauty, the fluid movement across the floor and into the air, in the same way. How can they move so seemingly effortlessly on such bandaged, bunioned, blistered feet? The box at the end of a ballerina's toe shoe makes it possible for her to go up on point. But only by crunching and compressing the cartilage, bone, and muscles of the foot. But for the sake of the dance, the ballerina gladly …