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Ready?

After finishing the last high intensity training block & feeling dizzy tired I've been on an easy week of training for the last 5 days. A little running, a little pootling on the fixie, a little splashing in the pool. After just a couple of days I was feeling good. I'm keen to race again & have been entering running races through October, November & December. I might regret that when the keenness wears off but it's always good to get muddy in the winter and races get you outside. Next year I'll try to race in August, but this year avoiding racing in August has also meant avoiding racing in the rain.

We're off to Pembrokeshire for a week away tomorrow (only booked on Monday). Maybe I'll chill out a bit and not think about work for a bit. Maybe the kids will love it and be beautifully behaved. I'm taking my bike so my peak(ish) week of training will be running on the Pembrokeshire coastal path, which I know quite well in the parts that we're going to, and cycling on new roads near the sea. The weather forecast is looking much better, as it often does when the kids are due to return to school. I'll be doing all my swim training in the sea with the jellyfish. They always used to get really big jellyfish around there.

When we get back the new students will have arrived, settled in, and I'll be teaching again. That week will be an easy week of training with some taper intervals leading up to my last triathlon of the year at Bala. I'm very interested to see what I can do after some well organised training and a taper.

I've got a ton of work to get done before I can go. I'll pack tomorrow.

High intensity training

My training finally shifted away from largely easy, aerobic base training to more intense race-like training recently. I broke my foot, was in plaster for 6 weeks and had to go back to aerobic training to rebuild my endurance and general fitness. This is my first year of triathlon racing (I've completed 2 triathlons in the past - in 1996 and 2003 I think) and my second year back into an endurance sport so I have a lot of basic training to get through to develop my fitness and skills for each sport.

My mileage and hourage (no, I don't think that's a word) has dropped but my sufferage and knackerage (them neither) have gone up. Woah, high intensity stuff is tough! From run training last year I know that anaerobic intervals on the track can have a profound effect on my running, but also that they wipe me out & I can't do them often. So, joy of joys, with triathlon I get to do intervals 3 times a week, once for each sport, plus tempo pace stuff.

Each session is met with a little trepidation, rather like a 2 hour run. Once started, I hammer it. Being able to hammer it to the end is something else though, and something that has noticeably improved over the last 6 weeks. Speed, lap times, time spent at high heart rates and at high speeds have also measurably improved. Running 800s at 5min/mi pace really helps with technique and efficiency. Steady runs after these feel different, more on the balls of your feet and more forward. Not that I'm getting much steady running in at the moment.

This week I'm barely running 35km but that's a session of 800s, a hilly run and a 30min run at 10k pace straight off a 20km tempo bike. No wonder I feel so tired. The fatigue from these workouts is quite different from the fatigue of high volume training.

I seem to be prepared for it though. Everything's holding up under the strain and I have an easy week next week to recover and test some elements of my fitness. Hopefully this will kick my race results up a notch for Bala, Dale and the Cardiff half marathon.

Golf has too many rules

Day 373: Golf has too many rules, originally uploaded by samwebster.

I was complaining about the number of rules in golf in a 365 Flickr photo last week and then this happens in the USPGA:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/golf/8916112.stm

Mid-season kit failures (cont)

I got my iBike power meter back from Velocomp in the USA, replaced under warranty after failing in the rain. It cost me to send it back across the Atlantic but it's working better than ever & has been happily out in the rain a few times. I really missed training with power and all the other data this magical little devices measures, displays & records.

Crud did a great job of replacing the smashed part of my roadracer mudguards for the cost of the postage. Send them a few stamps with your address & they post back the bits you need. Great idea! The new part looks like it has had a little redesign so they're still working on these things, which is also great. Easy to fit, and they fit in very slim gaps.

Sci-con also did a great job of admitting there has been a problem with some of the roller bags and sorting me out. My saddlebag fell off on a ride and was never seen again. I'm glad neither my phone or wallet were in it! They misunderstood and just sent me the plastic bit that attaches to the saddle (I still had that bit) but then sent me a complete new saddle bag and roller mounting when I pointed out the problem. From Italy! Nice. I had two of the bags so now I have three roller mounts. Maybe I should stick them on some of my other bikes. I only lost a tube, tyre levers and some patches. After this I'll definitely buy another diddy saddlebag for my race bike from Sci-Con. The roller mount doesn't fit the TT bike because the saddle is waaaay forward.

The strap on my Garmin 305 failed but instead of faffing about with getting a replacement from Garmin and potentially being without my main heart rate monitor and training computer for some time I just bought the quick release kit as it has a lovely big Velcro strap and comes with a nice clip-in bike mount so I don't have to use pipe lagging round my handlebars. Less than £15 from Amazon.

I splashed out and bought some more Castelli cycling shorts. Cycling shorts can be expensive but damned important if you're riding a lot. A pair of Adidas shorts I have leave smiley shaped sores on my butt if I cycle in the rain with them. I've stopped using nappy cream on Annabel & save it for myself. I never have enough training kit and really should buy some more running shoes, cycling shoes, socks, shorts, waterproof bits, jerseys, etc, etc, etc. Good stuff tends to survive the miles though.

Nothing major, but stuff that slows me down. I need to change the sealed bearing units in a front wheel and clean up some rust on the forks of my training bike (yes, its steel!) and some other typical maintenance stuff but that's ok. A lot of that work gets done in the winter as long as it doesn't fail before. I've also had to faff with other life hassles that really shouldn't exist like chasing Littlewoods for furniture they've charged me for but never delivered and chasing Apple for an iTunes card that they didn't authorise when they sold it. I hate jumping through hoops to solve problems other people cause. I love it when people accept responsibility and solve your problems like SciCon, Crud and Velocomp did. Hopefully training-wise I should be ok for a couple of weeks. I do need to find a wetsuit that fits though...

Careful now

I wondered if I would become more careful after breaking my foot. It's true that I've generally become more careful as I've become older (we learn from our mistakes?) but would the break or the time in plaster or the foolishness of it all drive me to wrap myself in bubblewrap in many aspects of my life?

Cornering on the bike hasn't been like it was when I was 18 for a long time. Putting holes in clothes from rubbing them against tarmac and then having to pay for new or ride in holey stuff has slowed me down there, no doubt. After riding through an icy winter it takes a while to regain the trust of friction between tarmac and rubber too. If I was road racing or hanging on in a criterium it would be a different matter, but training and the TT nature of triathlon doesn't reward the risk of fast, tight, hang-it-all-out cornering in quite the same way.

Running and walking I'm very careful of kerbs, but I always tended to watch where I was putting my feet anyway. I've also been very mindful of kids' toys around the house. Some of the harder, pointer ones would do nasty things to my left foot, so it's a bit of a minefield in the bedrooms. I often use a minesweeper action to clear a path through Jack's room.

But coming down the stairs slows me down. I don't bounce or run down stairs in the same way at all, as you might expect. When I approach the bottom of the staircase I take particular care. If I'm absently scratching my nose my brain picks up that I'm running out of stairs, it clears its process list and focuses all my attention on that bottom step.

Careful now.

Cast off

46 days post-fracture and I had the fibreglass cast cut off my left leg today, and my foot and its x-ray images examined. All seems good (although the callus looks messy on the x-ray - it would be great to look at the same bone in 12 months time to see the remodelling).

Notes from today:
- when the nurse took the cast off my ankle was shockingly weak. I had to be wheeled to x-ray and back. Very weird.
- an hour and a half later (after lots of wiggling and some cautious standing) I was able to carry Annabel upstairs at home, so rapid improvement.
- the bone is very superficial so I can just about palpate the fracture. There's no pain here.

As expected I've lost a lot of ankle strength and mobility, and my left calf is noticeably smaller than my right calf. I'll try to meet up with my sports therapist to get it assessed and a rehabilitation programme sorted out. I rode my fixie to the pool today in pouring rain and the ankle was fine. The ankle felt horrible in the pool but everything else was pretty much OK. Weak and weird.

Walking

41 days of healing. I walked 3km or so with Annabel with no pain in the area of the repairing bone today. At about a kilometre I had a dull sensation in the region of the fracture that quickly faded. After that the only discomfort was from the cast flexing and crushing my toes and banging against my heel.

I've been walking for 20-45 minutes 2 or 3 times a week for the last few weeks and the foot has been feeling fine. My consultant said the pain would let me know when I was doing too much. We all know how important mechanical loading is to bone functional adaptation, right?

Week 6 in plaster

I'm finally into my 6th and hopefully final week in plaster. My foot is feeling really solid still, and the only discomfort I'm getting is from the plaster cast flexing and squashing my toes and banging against my heels. Walking is still a bit of a hobble because the cast prevents any ankle movement and almost reaches my knee, making it impossible to fully flex the knee. The cast itself is starting to break down under the ball of the foot in thin areas, allowing it to flex where previously it was stiff.

A bus driver stopped at a pedestrian crossing to let a couple cross but was still looking at something in his cab when he accelerated towards me yesterday. He hadn't looked up and was only paying attention to the people he had seen out of the corner of his eye, so I had to hobble and shuffle quickly out of the way of the bloody thing and it's not easy to accelerate in a cast. It was a reflex reaction and my brain had briefly forgotten I was wearing the cast so my movement wasn't great. There wasn't any pain from the fracture area but the cast banging into bits of me and causing my knee to lock straight was uncomfortable and made me wince. The idea of getting run over by a bus at 5mph probably made me wince more.

I'm getting a little used to this free time, and starting to wonder how I'll adapt to going back to training next week. It's probably a good job that I entered all those races this spring and summer or I might have become a little lazier and not so keen to get out there every day, weather be damned. Upcoming races are a kick up the arse, excuse in hand (foot) or not. It feels like those lovely chemical rewards my drug-dealing brain got me hooked on for running, cycling and swimming every day are starting to wear off and I'm wondering why the hell I trained as much and as hard as I did. Make a plan, stick to the plan, get out the door, feel the opioids. I did cane it in the gym today so my worries are probably unfounded.

I've also been wondering if my attitude will change. Up until now I've been pretty indestructible. I was never a nutter rock climbing but I used to be able to put my head in a good place early in the season and climb some interesting stuff. I used to revel in the interesting stuff, but would maybe cack it a bit if I was pushing both my grade and the risk. But then I guess that's the point. Controlling the cack it factor. For a period I was making an average of one stupid potentially fatal mistake per year but survived, never really hurt myself (even when belayers didn't catch me!) and learnt from those mistakes. Indestructible. When Kim became pregnant with Jack something in my brain changed and I was never willing to climb as risky as before. Make of that what you will.

As I get older I get a little more sensible. Like the potentially fatal climbing errors I've learnt from I've also learnt to avoid the really icy roads, to ride straight, tall & slow (but don't brake!) through icy patches on the bike, and to not hammer it down greasy descents in the drizzle. Now that I've broken a bone and experienced the repair, the loss of fitness and the inconveniences, and have yet to even start the rehabilitation, will I become even more careful? To the point of losing time to competitors? Maybe I'm still indestructible. I feel like I'm healing quickly.

5 weeks in plaster

I've done 5 weeks in plaster now. That's 35 days in a cast from my toes to my knee on my left leg. From the end of week 4 the foot started to feel really solid again with no pain. I can sometimes wiggle it and find an interesting sensation, like probing a painful tooth with your tongue, but that's about all. Looking back through my tweets I see that I was predicted to not be walking without pain until 8 weeks or so, so that's encouraging. An orthopaedic colleague suggests I will be in trainers for a while when the plaster comes off, and that's fine with me. With walking and some work in the gym the strength and fitness of the quadriceps and hamstring muscles in my left leg have started to match that of my right leg agan already. Some of the work I've been doing in the gym has strengthened pre-existing weaknesses in my hip and core muscles to also better balance between left and right sides.

After periods of going nuts I'm starting to enter a new phase. Thanks to international adventure racing 1st year student star "Jacket" John Laughlin and a pile of inspiring DVDs he lent me my brain is feeling a bit better. But with 5 weeks of, essentially, sitting on my arse I'm falling back into that phase of, "do I really want to train every day for hours & hours"? My new found laziness is suggesting I take it easy. Swim every day? Are you mad? You want to go out on the bike for how long? Why? Part of my brain is sounding like normal people. I try to avoid being normal (normal is another word for "average"). If it's wet and cold when my plaster comes off I may have to push hard to get myself outside. But I doubt it. I'll lay down a plan and follow it, measure progress, and find out where the pain is.

I'm back in fracture clinic a week on Tuesday. I'll look after myself for 11 more days and hopefully my consultant will tell me I'm good to go. When I leave the care of the wonderful NHS I'll surround myself with the continued care of the University Sports Village and get myself back to form. That's half the fun.

How busy?

You never realise how much you do until you stop. This seems to be particularly true of training.

Skills swims, endurance swims, long runs, 800m track intervals, ME swims, easy bikes, cruise intervals, hilly bikes, long bikes, tempo runs, sea swims, maximum strength sessions, massage and foam rollers. When you stop all that a huge amount of time appears in your week. Not that you fill it with much. You kind of sit around a bit wondering what you should be doing. Is it only 9pm? What do I do now?

With a broken bone I guess I spend a fair bit more time sleeping (good for recovery and repair, lie-ins and early nights). I spend more time looking for things to read. I spent the first 3 weeks seriously levelling World of Warcraft characters (funnily, I want to spend more time in dungeons with a couple of them but those need 2-3 hour dedicated time slots and I'm now struggling to find any of those). I've been getting a bit of writing done, and I have more time to get work done in, but without the break part way through the day for training I find I'm a bit worn out by the mid-afternoon. So my productivity hasn't changed.

I've spent more time at home because I can't get myself about by bike or by car (would I be able to if I had an automatic?) So I rely on the generosity of others to get me to work and back. It has been great to spend a lot of time with Annabel (who has now climbed onto my chair and is hanging over my computer) and to see Jack when he gets home from school. Morning's haven't changed much. I'm not up at 6 and out the door as they wake any more, but everyone's in such a rush it's not much different.

I've got just under 2 weeks until my next fracture clinic appointment, at which I hope to be declared fairly fit and to have the plaster removed. The foot feels strong this week and there's no pain on walking or weighting it. I wouldn't like to go trampolining just yet though. I'll entertain myself for a bit by re-planning my training for 2010 in TrainingPeaks.com.

Week 4

My ability to walk and move is much easier three and a half weeks after breaking my foot, but the boredom isn't getting any easier to deal with. I really miss the feeling of movement, of running, swimming or cycling. Reading about it, or planning for the rest of the year doesn't help much (although watching it does, funnily enough).

I've ditched the crutches & I'm walking with a stick this week, which is causing much piss-taking. There's no pain when walking, but I wouldn't want to stand on tip-toes or run.

To make it worse, I missed my gym session today because of a screw up. Grumpy, bored, annoyed. I might have cut this plaster off with a dremel before I make it to six weeks.

Counting the days

I'm back into fracture clinic tomorrow morning. The foot feels pretty good and is well supported by the cast.

As you can see from the image above, I've got counters running that count the days of healing and count down towards my major races this year. I won't be that fit for Windsor but I might be going well by Bala.

Going nuts

It's almost two weeks since I fractured the bone in my foot and I'm starting to go nuts. Kim's surprised I've not gone mad already. I'm trying not to think about it.

Six weeks in plaster and six weeks out of training is the least of it. As I can't put any weight on my foot I've no idea if it's getting better, and there's no change in the pain on that side of my foot. Healing bones is a fairly slow process. If I saw repair in an x-ray I'd be happier. Six weeks in a cast will be followed by around six weeks of limited run/walking, and that's if all goes well. It could be worse. When the cast comes off at least I'll be able to get in the pool, so maybe my swimming will become awesome. That's something I'm looking forward to, and I think five days a week in the pool or sea is a real possibility.

If I can at least get a cycling shoe on and spin on the bike I'll be a very happy cyclist. Having cycling replacing much of the running this year helped my running. I wasn't sure if this would happen but in January I was running easy at 7:15 min/mi pace, and 7 min/mi pace was at the upper end of zone 2. I only reached that pace for effort as I was approaching the marathon last year, so that's an excellent sign for under 50km of running per week. If I can get on the bike I'll be ok. There will be a lot of rehab for my left leg though so I've no idea how I'll perform.

So all the races I'd planned this summer will be for fun and experience. I enjoy the complexity of multisport and I love to compete. If I can complete the early races I'll be doing well. A couple of weeks after the cast comes off I think I'll start my training all over again, starting the long endurance building period from scratch before I add real intensity. My long term goals require endurance, and that takes years to build so I don't want to short change this one. At least my high mileage weeks should be in the summer rather than March!

Trying to plan the months ahead is a little depressing, particularly when I think about the uncertainty of it all. I need to find something to focus on to take my mind off it all.

Spiral fracture of the distal shaft of the fifth metatarsal bone of my left foot

After a very brief assessment in fracture clinic this morning (and all that was needed) I had a load bearing cast wrapped around my leg, ankle and foot to replace the weekend's temporary backslap plaster cast.

The verdict: 6 weeks in a cast, no load bearing for 2 weeks, expect 8-12 weeks before walking with little pain. That rather dulls the 2010 racing season for me.

It is what it is and there's no point crying about it. I'll sit down and look at the year I had planned. I'll probably add a half-marathon to the end of the year (Cardiff maybe) to extend it and try to get under 80 minutes, and remember my long term goals. Races up to July will have new goals of "finish the race" and "learn". Training to that point and from July to October is unplannable at this stage. I'll get into the gym & work on the rest of my body, although walking on crutches is already helping that. I think I may be able to come up with some lightweight elastic band exercises but I can't exercise my left calf muscles at all, and I have to be careful of damaging the cast.

It is what it is.

Broken

Oh dear. I broke my foot this morning. I foolishly left too much crap in the hall downstairs, and when I ran downstairs to answer the door I was looking at the stuff instead of where I was placing my feet. I missed the bottom step, landed heavily and inverted my left foot. I couldn't walk it off and a rather nice haematoma had appeared by the time I took my sock off a little later, so I spent the afternoon in A&E/X-ray/fracture clinic. I have a spiral fracture of the shaft of my 5th metatarsal.

I've got plaster on for the weekend & will get reassessed on Monday. I'll probably get a walking cast put on then.

Bugger. I guess I'll level all my World of Warcraft characters to level 80 then.