Week 30: Review

Given last week's successes, I continued building up both swimming and cycling this week. Fortunately, everything is still going along smoothly and there are no signs of trouble. I'm still limping a little, so I held off on introducing a walking regime, however it's gotten a lot better over the course of this week (no pain, just stiff). I'll probably add that in sometime near the end of this week to test things out, and hopefully I'll be able to get back into running in the near future.

As things went so well on the bike, I slowly added some hills in the rides this week. On Saturday's group ride, the plan was for a relatively flat ride but we missed a turnaround and ended up on some larger hills. Thankfully, aside from tiring me out, there were no problems so I'm likely safe to reintroduce them into my normal routine. Naturally, I will still like avoid explicitly looking for hills to be safe, but I'm also not going to go out of my way to avoid them.

As far as my fitness goes, I'm okay on flat ground but I've obviously lost a lot of climbing strength. Before the injury I usually opened up a significant gap every time we hit some hills, but this time a couple of them were able to drop me pretty comfortably when things got steep. The aerobic engine is still there, but the leg strength has been eaten away so my ability to power through the hard stretches is compromised. With that said, part of the issue was likely that I was being very conservative with the gearing to play it safe (ie downshifting early to granny gears), so when I get my nerve back things should improve.

I'm hoping that adding hills back into my normal routine will help to remedy that, and I think I'll add in a bit more aggressive speedwork to help. Naturally, doing explicit hill work would be the best way to get that back, but I'm not sure that I want to try standing climbs in the big ring just yet as that can put different forces on the foot.

Week 30 Totals:
Running: 0.0km 0.0mi)
Walking: 0.0km (0.0mi)
Cycling: 162.4km (100.9mi)
Swimming: 6.5km (4.0mi)
Total: 168.9km (104.9mi)

Year to Date:
Running: 758.6km (471.35mi)
Walking: 28.4km (17.6mi)
Cycling: 2289.5km (1422.6mi)
Swimming: 155.4km (96.6mi)
Total: 3231.9km (2008.2mi)

The weather for week 31 is looking a lot better, although it's going to get steamy again on Friday. We've got another group ride planned for Saturday, so I'm hoping to be a bit more competitive this time around ;) Either way, I'm just happy to be out there in this gorgeous weather once again and the plan is to take full advantage of what is left of the summer!