The view from behind

This weekend showed glorious weather to Atlanta. We had sub-70 degree days here – amazing. 40 degrees one day, 70 the next. Crazy.

This month of December is “strengthen and rebuild” focus only. Any work I do to try to rebuild fitness will only backfire if my muscles are not strong enough to absorb the work. The crash aside, the problems I was facing this season with my back (that came to a head while I was training in Boulder in September) are still there. I haven’t escaped the need to address them. JZ has been such an awesome support system for me with this… after the Olympics she went through near career-ending issues with her back. Watching me all hunched over after dismounting the bike each day was eerily familiar to her; the advice she has been giving me has been its usual bulls-eye accuracy. She’s advising me the same protocol she herself went through post-Sydney when she came back to race stronger than ever.

Regardless if I ever race again, my back issues (things not related to bike crash) have definitely creeped into hindering my every day living. The advice I am following is definitely to help me regain movement simply for living first.

Sunday (yesterday) I decided to try to ride with a few of the athletes I coach in town. I’m only supposed to be riding a max of 1 hour, but decided I would try to ride longer if I felt ok. Since I’ve been doing a lot of work trying to strengthen my glutes I wanted to see how my back felt at this point after riding.
It was great to start out with Andy, Kristy, Amy and Alberto. Andy had some faster-paced work on his schedule, so soon enough he was peeling on ahead – I decided to try to sit on his wheel for a bit. I definitely felt out of shape, but I was surprised by how well I was able to ride. Granted, I was sucking the guy’s wheel and I only rode with him for 30:00 at that intensity (felt like 1/2 IM effort to me), but it was nice that my body just sort of fell back into habit. It knew what to do.

Soon enough Andy peeled on ahead and I went back for the others to ride for a bit with them. I rode for 2-hours and was happy with that. My back ached like a Buick was driving through it, but pain I can tolerate. When I dismounted I noted a definite improvement in my normal back related pain. It’s still there, but seemed better.

I later got in the pool before the swim clinic Tim Storsteen and I were doing, and tried to gut out some 100’s on 1:30. I was actually able to hit a few of these, so that was good, but mostly my current pace seems to hover around 1:40-1:45. Eeek. It’s amazing to me how much slower I am, how much my broken body has affected my form and feel for the water. I feel completely different as a swimmer. I have lost flexibility in my torso, too, and flip turns are stabbing, but I know it will come back; it really is amazing to me how different it all is.

I woke up this morning SORE from a 2-hour fairly easy ride, and a 2000 swim. Good GRIEF!! I’m headed to the gym now for glute work and a 20:00 run.

If nothing else, in a few months I hope I am at least looking better from behind…. Yeah, baby!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 2:34 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.