Moving into the Pain Cave

The coach has me scheduled for a long, nasty, brutal, painful, rewarding week.

Plan Time:
Swim 2:00
Bike 11:00
Run 2:30
Strength 1:00
Sched 16:30

And it comes at a decent time. A week like this would not have been possible last week. I was in the middle of football recruiting week, a heavy week of college basketball and the normal load of family commitments.

But with a lighter week at work – though I do have to travel to Boise for a basketball game – I’m looking forward to a week of focus and pain.

It’s weeks like these that make me glad I have my basement and the CycleOps 300PT waiting for me. Though the sun is staying out longer, I’m still scheduled pretty heavily during the days with the kids and all their activities and homework. Putting them to bed, grabbing a DVD or loading up The Sufferfest and hopping aboard the 300PT means I can sneak in 120 minutes of pain and suffering after dark.

In other news, the Deseret News is giving me a new writing opportunity. While squeezing lots of cycling, triathlon and training news into the print section might not be a prudent use of our limited, and ever shrinking print product, we will soon have a new online section/blog called The Pain Cave.

I’ll include race reports, training tips (from experts, not me), updates from the big dogs on the NRC and Pro Tour and anything else I can think of that local cycling, triathlon, running and other endurance sports geeks are interested in.

I have the (lack of) POWER!

If I ever get brave enough, or the weather gets warm enough, I have a new way to measure my suckage.

I wonder if there’s such a thing as negative wattage?

That red disk you see is an 11-28 cassette. Made specifically for sissies who can’t climb.

Dream crit course is just that, a dream

Denied.

That’s the word from the Utah Department of Public Safety. I asked if I could rent the public safety training course south of Camp Williams for a one-day crit race.

I got shot down, as expected. Still, I felt like asking was worth the effort.

Here’s the reply:

The POST Director and others have no desire to open up the EVO Track for private use.  Apparently (before I was here) we have been approached by various car clubs, motorcycle clubs and other bike enthusiasts to use the track, to no avail.

I was told Risk Management did not want to get involved then and probably won’t want to now.  Even though you have an umbrella insurance coverage, that would not guarantee that if someone (participant or spectator) was hurt they wouldn’t still go after the deep pockets of the State.  I realize people use the Driver License driving course over at the Rampton, I don’t know the circumstances.

So, from our level the answer is sorry, we aren’t interested in renting the EVO track.

On to Plan C

Everybody’s dream race course

Lots of people have seen it.

They pedal their bikes down Redwood Road just south of Camp Williams and see what looks like a race track with no traffic, ample parking, sweeping curves, fast straights and some small climbs and think to themselves “That would be the perfect place to hold a crit race.”

Me, too.

So I contacted the Utah Department of Public Safety and asked if it would be possible to have a race out there.

Here’s the reply.

I plan on taking your proposal into staff meeting Monday, Jan. 25, to discuss it with the POST director and others.  We have typically never done this because we didn’t want to open the gates to this type of activity at a state facility, frequently it ends up being more problems than its worth and the Risk Management people don’t usually encourage it.

However, I will bring it up and see what happens.  I’ll get back in touch with you first of next week.

Never hurts to ask, right?

Cross your fingers.

I’m thinking March 20 — an open date on the UCA’s current calendar.

I have the power!

I have a new tool to measure my weakness, err, power when I ride my bike.

With this, integrated with my Garmin 705 and under the advice of my coach, I should be able to see how far behind I am in the lofty goals I’m setting for myself.

Coach will prescribe workouts with target power and cadence ranges for different types of workouts. If I meet them, I’ll be much more prepared to race with the power — the kind in my legs, not just on a bike computer monitor — and hopefully see results.

It’s not a stress fracture

Just an undetermined injury involving the muscles, tendons, ligaments, etc.

And it will require significant real rest for recovery. That means not pretend rest where I ‘take it easy’ by running at a slow pace. The impact would still be the same, so why run ‘easy’ when running fast would do no more damage?

So I’ll just not run — at all — for a month.

But I’ll hammer it on the bike, pound out laps in the pool and strengthen the legs in the weight room.

I suppose I might be ‘behind’ when the first triathlon comes along in a couple of months. But I’ve never really been a great runner anyway.

So I won’t really be behind, will I?

I’ll just not be ‘ahead.’

Rattle and Hum, pedal and sweat

My morning and early afternoon was pretty booked with family stuff. And that was nice. Got to spend some quality time with some cousins, in-laws, grandmas, grandpas, etc. The kids had a great time and I had a fabulous salad for lunch.

Then I came home, took a little nap to digest it all and slipped into the bibs for a ride in the basement.

While there, I loaded in the U2 Rattle and Hum DVD and rocked out to some of the best rock and roll recorded in the last couple of decades.

The DVD was 98 minutes and I logged about 37 miles on the trainer in the basement.

Good time and movies – especially rock and roll – makes the time pass by pretty quickly.

But I’m missing the road.

I need some pavement and I’m pretty sure I’ll go out and find it Monday morning.

On the injury front, I’m still a little bummed about having to take a significant chunk of time off from running. I was starting to enjoy it again and had my endurance at a 8:00 mile pace up to a solid hour at a fairly comfortable feeling.

I’m going to get a second doctor’s opinion on the stress fracture and quite possibly end up with a bone scan to determine the exact extent of the injury, if it’s actually a stress fracture and what treatment (if more than rest) is needed.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to some Masters Swim classes and plenty of time in the saddle.

I guess I’m actually injured

I paid a visit to a sports medicine doctor today, one who is a racing cyclist himself, and after x-rays he informed me there is a decent possibility that the pain I’ve been experiencing is the result of a stress fracture.

That’s not the definitive diagnosis, but a preliminary one. The x-rays showed a slight shadow on the bone where I’ve been feeling the discomfort. I was told a second opinion from a radiologist would be needed to make sure what he saw was what he thought he saw.

If it is, I’m done running for a few weeks while I rest the bone and hope it heals. The injury has been there since October, so it’s not a new thing. Just something I’ve been dealing with for a while. And now I have a decent idea of what it actually is instead of guessing at everything from a ruptured tendon to the wrong pair of shoes or even one arch lower than the other.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is I can still ride my bike at race pace and do intervals. I shouldn’t do any hard climbing, but in case you haven’t noticed, biking up the local canyons isn’t a good idea right now anyway.

I can also swim all I want, of course.

So, I’ll stop pounding my feet into a treadmill or track for a month and get back at it.

One less thing for me to try and work into my day, right?

Am I soft, or actually injured?

I’ve had this nagging pain in my ankle for months. I’ve rested it, hoped it would get better and it’s still there.

Wednesday’s 6-mile run brought it back.

The pain isn’t super bad unless I apply pressure to it. I can feel a little discomfort when my run is getting long, but it’s not that bad — unless I touch it.

I tried to massage it thinking a little rub might help. Nope.

I tried to use a foam roller on it at the advice of an expert running coach and one of the best triathletes in the state. As soon as I hit the roller, it was like I had been stabbed in the ankle.

It’s not really the ankle, it’s the area above and around the knob of the inner ankle.

So I sent an e-mail to a sports medicine doctor friend of mine who has been part of the USA Olympics staff for the last several years. I described the symptoms, the pain and what I’ve done.

He replied with these three words: tibialis posterior tendinitis.

The runner’s cure for a winter inversion

Running laps at the gym can get pretty mind-numbing. Those 0.1 mile circles will kill your brain as well as your ankles.

So today, with a seven mile run prescribed by the coach on the agenda, I decided to avoid the tiny-little laps as well as the rancid air in the valley by making the short drive up to the Utah Olympic Oval.

There, a runner can do his thing in a climate controlled environment with clean air, long laps and Olympic training partners — if you can keep up with the skaters

Because it surrounds a 400-meter ice rink, the running track is actually a little longer than what you’d find at your local high school. So if you’re good at math, you can adjust your laps accordingly and run to your little heart’s content.

Admission is $2.50 per person, or you can buy an unlimited annual family pass to the faciity for $99 and that includes skating and skate rentals – a real bargain, IMO.

Today, because my ankle is still bothering me, I cut things short at 21 laps of running plus a couple of brisk walking laps for warmup and cool down. Got six miles in and feel pretty happy about it — although the ice bag on my ankle sure is annoying.