Week 6: Review

While it has been a relatively cold winter, we've been lucky that most of the snow that's fallen has been cleaned up pretty well and I haven't had to run through too much of it. Unfortunately, last week's long run was an exception to that and had me going over a lot of uneven terrain. The result of that was that the inside of my left knee felt a bit off on Tuesday and after my group run on Wednesday it was a bit uncomfortable so I ended up taking off the rest of the week to be safe (nipping things in the bud when it's just discomfort is easier than dealing with injuries after it becomes pain). Naturally, the result of that is some pitiful mileage on the running front.

Fortunately, it didn't seem to bother me at all in the other two sports so I was able to keep things up on those two fronts. The knee seems to only be aggravated by lateral motion, and as the bike locks my motion into a single plane that's not an issue there. In the pool, the arms do most of the work and the kicks come more from the hips than the knees so it doesn't pose an issue there as well. To be safe, however, I made sure to push off on my right leg at the end of each length as that can sometimes put stresses on the joint.

I did miss one ride on Monday as that's when I did last week's aforementioned long run, but other than that I hit all of the sessions as planned (including a 60K on Saturday). I did back off the intensity to be safe, as fatigued muscles may lead to slightly more eccentric motion of the joints, but other than that I stuck to the schedule. In the water, however, I followed my normal protocol with the only exception being that I replaced kicking drills with others to be absolutely sure it wasn't a problem.

The upside to a multi-sport regime is that when stuff like this happens you aren't totally shut down. While I've likely lost a bit of fitness over this week, the cycling and swimming should do a good job of keeping my cardiovascular strength up so it's just a matter of rebuilding a bit of lost strength in the legs (which is a lot easier to get back). It also has the benefit of warming up the tissues in the legs to allow me to properly stretch things on a routine basis and hopefully help to resolve whatever the underlying cause is. Naturally, it doesn't always work as there are a lot of bits that are used across the sports, but fortunately this time it was isolated to one of them :D

Week 6 Totals:
Running: 8.6km (5.3mi)
Walking: 0.0km (0.0mi)
Cycling: 110.0km (68.4mi)
Swimming: 8.8km (5.4mi)
Total: 127.4km (79.2mi)

Year to Date:
Running: 283.7km (176.3mi)
Walking: 8.3km (5.2mi)
Cycling: 630.4km (391.7mi)
Swimming: 48.2km (30.0mi)
Total: 970.6km (603.1mi)

Either way, the knee is feeling much better today and I'll likely be good to get back into the swing of things tomorrow or the day after. I probably could have gone out on Sunday, but there was still a bit of tightness left in the joint and I didn't want to risk wasting the time off this week. Right now it's just a tiny hint (although that may very well just be in my mind) and I'm hoping that by tomorrow that will be gone and I can give it another a shot.