Feels Good to be Back!

I finally got to the point where I can walk comfortably without any aides, so I headed back to the pool this morning for my first session. Naturally, with nearly seven weeks downtime I figured that I'd pretty much be back to square one so I expected it to be a hard slog. As I didn't really know what I'd be able to do, I elected to just play it by ear and do whatever I could.

Fortunately, however, once I got going I actually felt quite good and was able to get in a decent workout. For the first set, I originally planned to just do 100m intervals, but by the end of it I was feeling great so I opted to push that to 250m. Once I got near that point I was still going strong, so I kept going until I hit the 1km mark and took a break (still felt good, but figured it was unwise to push it beyond that). I followed up with another 1000m set, then switched over to some drills to test out my speed/breathing. Once I completed them, I still had some time left in the session so I did an easy 500m cooldown to finish it off.

I didn't push as hard as I usually do so my pace was pretty pathetic, however I want to take it carefully as I start back up. I most certainly have lost a good chunk of strength, but fortunately my stamina (which is a lot harder to build back up) seems to be largely intact. I'm just crossing my fingers that the same will be true on the cycling front, as I'm not really looking forward to going back to short little 10-20K rides :OP

Either way, I'll keep chipping away with it and hopefully get myself back into shape as quickly as I can safely get away with. I was flirting with trying another swim tomorrow as well, but the pool is going to be closed for an event so I'll stick to the Tuesday/Thursday schedule for now. I'm hoping to take the bike out later this week for a short jaunt around the subdivision, as that's the sport I'd really like to get back into given our weather right now! It's still going to be a long hard climb back to where I was, but fortunately it appears that I didn't fall down the mountain quite as far as I feared :D


In other news, the Peterborough half-iron race that I had originally planned to run was last weekend but I headed up anyway as several good friends were doing it and the sprint that went along with it. I do have to say that it was nice to see a race like this from the other side of the fence, so I'll have to make sure to do that more often ;) There is a lot going on during these races, and it can be quite an exercise to stay on top of everything as your friends go in and out of transition. It was a heck of a steamy day and it was hard enough standing around, so it's all the more impressive for those that were pushing themselves to the limit in those conditions!

The race itself was very well organized, with a good layout and minimal lineups for the multitude of registration steps. Only thing that would have made it better would be if the race timing folks could set up those text messaging notifications that many marathons have. Trying to be on top of when everyone is going to come in and out is much more complicated in this sport (especially with multiple races going on simultaneously), so having an idea of where they are would make spectating much, much easier :P