Well, at the minute I am in limbo. My knee is not better. My
“last chance” race this season is just over 3 weeks away. Every day that passes
now, things look less and less likely that I’ll be lining out at Ironman
Weymouth on 11th September. All I can do is wait and hope. After 11th
September, regardless of whether I race or not, that’s my season over. Ironman
Wales on 18th September is not an option – if my knee is not OK for Weymouth,
it’s unlikely to be OK for Wales a week later. And I want to go and support
Matt at Wales anyway. There’ll be nothing more to train for this year after
Weymouth. I’ll come down off this fitness peak, and likely leave London and
make a new start, and I’m not sure I want to go through all the training and
punishment and sacrifice and spending and stress again next year to try again.
I had an MRI scan on my injured knee and I finally got the
results back: all clear. By that, I mean that there are no broken bones, and no
damage to ligaments, tendons, cartilage or muscles. It’s “just” very bad bone
bruising. How long does that take to recover? How long is a piece of string?
Weeks, months… It must have been a heck of a crack when I hit my knee off the
rocks. So I’m playing the waiting game.
It is good news that there’s no serious damage to my knee. Yes,
it should never have happened, but at least there’s no serious damage. Still, when I try
to run, my knee becomes excruciatingly sore. I’ve got a high pain threshold,
but when I try to run, it is off the scale. So I literally can’t run.
Everything else seems to be OK now: walking, cycling and swimming. It’s just
the impact of running that brings on the most awful pain.
I tried to run one week after the injury, and it was awful.
I had to stop within 5 minutes because of the pain. Then I waited 10 days to
allow recovery, and I tried again. I had the same horrendous pain, but it came
on after 10 minutes rather than 5 minutes. Then I waited another week, and
tried again. And it was the same horrendous pain, but after 15 minutes. So the
pain isn’t getting any better or worse, but it’s taking slightly longer to
start getting horrendously sore. I just think that it’s not getting better
quick enough.
20 or 30 or even 60 minutes of mediocre, doubt-filled running
is no good to me. I need to be able to run well for a marathon distance, after
a long swim and bike. I don’t want to fork out a lot of money and enter Ironman
Weymouth with doubt, wondering if I’ll be able to run the distance. I want to
know that my knee is good enough to be pain free and to allow me to run well.
For that reason, I haven’t entered Ironman Weymouth yet, nor have I made any
other travel, car rental, or hotel arrangements for the race. If I do enter, it
is looking like it is going to be a very late call. I hope if I make the call
to enter, there will still be entries available, and that there will be a hotel
room somewhere close to the start, and a car available to rent.
So I’m very frustrated because I have a lot of fitness that
I can’t do anything with, and I’m frustrated that I have nothing to show for
all the effort Ironman-wise (again). I am still training on the bike (turbo trainer),
still training in the pool, still doing my weights and core work. But it’s a
struggle to get myself properly fired up to do it, because of the fact that
there might not be an end product, so it all might be for nothing. And I can’t
stand doing things for no reason. Things become pointless without a purpose. So
this is quite tough mentally and emotionally, because I continually hope that
things will be OK and that my knee will be fine, and I force myself not to run,
and I think my knee might be starting to feel better, and then I go out and try
to run, and it’s still bad, and I wonder will it get better quick enough to
allow me to race in September, and I wonder is that it for my Ironman career,
and it’s all very frustrating.
But anyway, I am training as much as I can, because all I
can do is assume that I will be competing. There’s no point in not training
while there is still a chance that I will be able to race in September. So I’m trying
to maintain and/or improve my bike and swim fitness. Whatever small amount of
running I have done, I hope it’s enough to maintain some sort of conditioning
in my legs and feet, to be able to withstand the pounding of running. Legs
de-condition from running very quickly, and once they are de-conditioned, it
takes a while to get the conditioning back. If you do run on de-conditioned
legs, your muscles fatigue a lot quicker, your joints get sorer faster, you are
more prone to getting blisters, and you recover slower.
I have written to the Ironman organisation several times
about what happened, and all they have written back, on each occasion,
identically written on each occasion, is “it is with our insurers and we will
make a statement in due course”. So I guess they realise they have a problem.
I’ve been away on two work trips recently – one to Italy,
and one to Devon. In Italy, I went to a factory in a small town not far from
the French border. It was nice enough.
There’s a big central square, closed to traffic, and the main drag in
the town is a long straight road that leads all the way to the French border.
The hotel was right on this square. After work, I noticed quite a few fancy
bikes lapping the square, and some sort of event being set up at the far end. I
wandered over to have a look.
It turned out that it was a cycling time trial event, open
to all. It was a 2km event – down a starting ramp at the edge of the town
square, up the main drag for 1km, around a turn-around marking, and back down
to the square. They had closed the roads. It looked amazing. A big wide, empty,
closed road, the whole town out watching, and people of all ages taking part.
Even little kids. Bikes and good vibes everywhere. A nice warm evening. I
watched it for hours, and got chatting to a few people. It was great. I wished
I’d had a bike. I walked the full length of the course, and took some photos.
Below are the best of what I took, but I was pretty restricted by the crappy
camera on my old iPhone4. Saying that, I tried to be a bit creative and some of
the photos aren’t bad:
I’ve been doing a lot of strength work in the pool recently,
using my hand paddles and doing single-arm drills to try to build strength in
my arms and upper body. In Devon, I went to the pool after work one day, and it
was almost empty. I decided to do a 4km “time trial”. Time trials are usually
flat-out efforts, but I did this time trial at what I thought was Ironman
intensity, so a bit less than flat out. It’s the first time in 3 or 4 weeks
that I’ve done a “normal” continuous swim without the hand paddles. It felt
great, I was just cruising up and down the pool, in a great rhythm, in the
zone, feeling great and feeling strong. I did the 4000m in 65 minutes, which
means I’d have done a non-wetsuit Ironman-distance 3800m pool swim with no
tumble turning in 62 minutes. For me, that’s not bad. But as pleased as I was,
I was all the more frustrated at knowing that my knee is still not allowing me
to run. For what I’m trying to do and for what I’m training for, having good
swim and bike fitness is pointless without the ability to run well.
Devon hotel, middle of nowhere, silence, nice
Another thing that happened recently was that I got the
angriest I’ve ever been on a turbo trainer. I was doing a 4-hour session.
Mind-numbing. I was watching stuff on the laptop, but not really engaged with
it, because everything was just mind-numbing. My feet got really sore because
it seems that either my bike shoes have shrunk, or my feet have got bigger, or
a mixture of both. My legs hurt, my arse hurt, and my arms hurt because I had
forced myself to maintain the aero position for hours on end. It was warm and I
was getting dehydrated, so my head hurt. I tasted of salt, I was caked in salt
from my sweat, and I was questioning what the point of it was when I don’t even
know if I’ll be competing, and realistically it looks less and less likely that
I will be able to.
The session I did was what I call an “increasing block”
session. I did 15-minute blocks, starting at moderate intensity, and ramping up
every 15 minutes. Then after an hour, I took the intensity down, but not down
as low as it had been at the start of the previous block. So by the time you
start your 4th hour, you’re riding at an intensity that’s as tough as the
toughest intensity from the first hour. The first couple of hours are OK, by
the end of the third hour things are getting bad, and then the entire fourth
hour is just a nightmare of pain that gets worse and worse, because like some
sort of masochist you keep ratcheting it up every 15 minutes. I was effing and
blinding and huffing and puffing and grinding and gritting and grunting and
gutting it out, and wanted so much to quit in the fourth hour. I was asking
myself what was the point of all this pain. Literally everything hurt. I need
bigger bike shoes. But I didn’t quit. I got through it. The angriest turbo session
ever.
And then a week later, I did a similar session, knowing full
well what I was in for. For the past however many years, I’ve been doing
similar sessions. I don’t know how I make myself do it, but there’s no choice
to be made, I’m training as if I’ll be competing at Weymouth, and so I have to
do the work. I planned an hour at Ironman race intensity, then an hour at
slightly higher intensity, then an hour at slightly higher intensity again,
then a final hour at slightly higher intensity again. The aim is to get used to
maintaining the high intensity when you are tired.
When I was on the turbo trainer on this occasion, my tyre
completely shredded itself. I noticed that my pedalling suddenly felt different
after about 2 hours, and it felt like the back wheel was slipping slightly. I
looked back, and visually, things looked fine. I hate getting off the turbo in
the middle of a session, but I sort of needed to pee anyway, so I got off. The
tyre was flat. I needed to take off the back wheel, take off the tyre, and put
a new tube in. But I was mid-session and didn’t want to spend 5 or 10 minutes
doing this. So I pumped up the tyre, and because I expected it to go flat
again, I cranked up the resistance on the turbo trainer to compensate.
The tyre was fine for about 5-10 minutes, then went flat
again, but my pedalling wasn’t affected too much as I had increased the turbo’s
resistance. So I just got on with it. 2 hours to go. Things went OK until I
started the fourth hour. By then I was working hard and didn’t want to take
time out to fix the tyre properly. I was doing all I could just to keep
pedalling, and I’d have been too uncoordinated by now to change the tube
properly anyway. So I tried to ignore the smell of burning rubber…
Only an hour to go... 50 minutes… 40 minutes… the smell was
getting worse. The tyre was shredding itself against the turbo flywheel. I had
to put the bike in top gear to maintain the resistance level. I looked back.
Flecks of black rubber were all over the carpet and wall in my room. Not good.
30 minutes to go. I was having to pedal fast at 100rpm to maintain the wattage
that I wanted, and this was making my heart rate skyrocket. 20 minutes to go.
Now I was having to go at 110rpm. I couldn’t pedal any faster. I wanted to
finish the session, as much as I was hating it. I hoped I’d finish before I
started a fire…
By the time it was over, I was wrecked. My light-coloured
carpet had turned black with shreds of rubber. My light-coloured wallpaper had
turned black immediately behind the turbo trainer where flecks of warm rubber
had been shredding off the tyre and firing at the wall. There was even rubber
on the ceiling. My room stank of burnt rubber. The tyre itself was ruined, and
warm and sticky to touch. It was a new tyre too, installed only a couple of
weeks ago as I had finally managed to destroy a Gatorskin tyre over the last
couple of years on the turbo. Gatorskins are almost literally bulletproof
tyres. My Gatorskin on the turbo had finally given up on me after countless thousands
of miles over the years, the sidewalls torn, the rubber worn away, and it
making a horrible screeching noise on the turbo by the end of its life.
So I had to deep-clean and deep-ventilate my room, i.e. I got
the hoover out and opened the all the windows in the house. My relationship
with my turbo trainer has deteriorated quite a lot in the last few weeks and
months. The last two long turbo sessions I’ve done have not been good – they’ve
left me swearing in awful pain, they’ve left my room stinking and black, and
they’ve almost burned the house down (exaggerating only slightly…) If and when
I leave London, hopefully I can actually go outside and actually properly cycle
out of doors.
What else can I write about? Ermmm… probably not a lot, I’m
just hoping for a miracle now with my knee, and that it’ll allow me to run 26.2
miles after having swam 3.8km and cycled 112 miles… I will give it every chance
and continue to train and continue to hope, and if there’s any way at all I
feel that I can compete at Ironman Weymouth, on 11th September, I’ll be there…
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