I may be back

Not all is lost

I haven’t updated my blogger for a while because I pretty much haven’t been training due to injury. It has been a big learning curve lately in finding the cause of my injury. Firstly, I have compartment syndrome and luckily I acted on it very quickly and we are now just starting to get on top of things 12 weeks down the track. I had to do research and plenty of it in order to understand the cause of this overuse injury. As a result we discovered (physio, massage therapist, biomechanist and myself) that the injury is a result of poor biomechanics on the bike and run and extremely inflexible lower body.
I addressed these issues by changing my shoes from an asics keyano to asics nimbus. I have for the first time discovered that I’m a supinator and not a pronator. The asics keyano shoes are actually for people who pronate, while the nimbus shoe is for people who supinate. This improved the way I run immediately. I then decided to do some research on the bike. I booked for a professional bike fit and it was the best $160 I have spent so far. I my seat was moved up 2.5 cm. The cleats in my shoes were moved forward and my saddle was moved forward 1cm. All these changes meant that I was no longer putting so much strain on my dorsi flexion during the downward stroke on the peddles. After taking only 1 week off from riding I went on a 2hr solid ride and had absolutely no pain in my lower leg. I could believe the difference.
In the meantime my physio and massage therapist each once per week have been hammering away at my poor flexibility through the application of deep tissue massage and plenty of Chinese cupping (ie refer photo). This has been a much slower development but there have been some marginal signs of improvement.
Finally, my poor core stability is being addressed and has contributed, on top of everything else, to all the injuries I have experienced in the past. I’m now on a very strict daily dose of core strength work and this will hopefully be the icing on the cake in terms of recovering from this injury and any future injury.
It was only a week ago that I had resided to the fact that there was no chance of me being able to qualify for Port IM. There is now a very small window of opportunity starting to appear. My physio thinks he may now be able to get me right for the Canberra ½. While I know I’ll probably be well under trained for this, I’ll still do whatever I can to try and qualify for Port next year.
So next week I have been given the go ahead to start out with some light cycling and a couple of 20min runs. Lets just hope things work out for the better this time. I would just love to put together a years worth of training without any hint of injury.

I’m back and I keep my weekly updates coming in. Thanks again to everyone over at Transitions. The positive words have really helped in keeping me on track and focused.

Fluro