Weeks 44 & 45: Setbacks

The last couple weeks have been a bit of a setback due to a minor injury, but thankfully I'm back on the saddle at this point and building my way back up. Week 44 started out well, but on Friday night I noticed that my left knee was a bit swollen along the outside edge of the kneecap. It didn't hurt at all, nor was there any discomfort, however as it is now the off season it wasn't worth risking things so I took a few days rest. Fortunately, it went away after a couple of days without incident so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it wasn't anything serious.

To be safe, this week I gradually eased back into the routine. On Tuesday, I started out with a 1K walk, then accelerated to an easy 3 mile jog and finished up with a 600m cooldown walk. Fortunately, there was no problems and the run went off without a hitch. I pondered going out for my Wednesday ride, but the hills around here mean that it's difficult to take it easy so I skipped it and just did my group run that afternoon. I stepped back up to my normal 5 mile route on Thursday, and did a quick and easy 30K ride on Saturday.

This morning, I did my first long run back after this episode falling back to 10 miles to play it safe. With that in the bag, I now feel relatively comfortable that all is healed and I'll begin rebuilding back to where I was this week. With that said, I'm going to slowly ramp the mileage back up as I've likely lost a bit of fitness thanks to the lost sessions so I don't want to overdo things.

Week 44 Totals:
Running: 26.2km (16.3mi)
Walking: 0.7km (0.5mi)
Cycling: 60.8km (37.8mi)
Swimming: 8.7km (5.4mi)
Total: 96.4km (59.9mi)

Week 45 Totals:
Running: 39.5km (24.5mi)
Walking: 3.1km (1.9mi)
Cycling: 30.4km (18.9mi)
Swimming: 0.0km (0.0mi)
Total: 73.0km (45.4mi)

Year to Date:
Running: 1940.6km (1205.8mi)
Walking: 85.7km (53.3mi)
Cycling: 4337.2km (2695.0mi)
Swimming: 289.8km (180.1mi)
Total: 6653.3km (4134.2mi)

With the season largely over at this point, I'm hoping to put together a brief review of the year but in the interests of expedience I'll save that for a dedicated post ;) Due to scheduling I didn't achieve many of the things I set out to do, but I had a solid season of training so the lessons learned should be useful going forward.

In other news, I've gotten an offer from a friend to buy my Edge 705 so I'm flirting with the idea of upgrading to the new Edge 800. Had he not asked I likely wouldn't have thought about it, but it's an opportunity to get the newer model without too much cost and being the gadget freak that I am it's tempting. The new model addresses most of the little issues that I had with the 705 and adds some compelling new features (touch screen, satellite maps, the ability to overlay race course maps, etc.). It has a few issues that I'm not crazy about (eg no way to force 1 second recording, .fit files rather than more widely supported .tcx, reduced onboard memory), but in the balance I think the good outweighs the bad. Trying to figure out where I can be bought and what the Canadian prices will be at this point, but if all goes well I may have a new toy to play with soon ;)