Tuesday, February 15, 2011

The hole in my canoe..


and your canoe as well..  Perhaps I should explain?  Your fitness and ability to race can be viewed in many ways, but I’m going to try an analogy to explain the challenge for all athletes.
Imagine you’re in a canoe and it has a small hole in the bottom where the water comes in.  For the sake of this analogy we will also say the canoe has some foam buoyancy so that even if it fills up with water it won’t sink completely.
Next I want you to think of paddling your canoe as racing and that bailing water out of your canoe as training.  Remember your canoe had a hole in the bottom so the water comes in.. In this case your canoe symbolises your fitness. And mine too

So if you bail out your canoe, it sits higher out the water, it’s lighter agile and will go faster. But if you only bail out and don’t race you haven’t gone anywhere, ie the fun bit which is racing.  If you never did any bailing then your canoe gets heavier as it fills up, it is less agile and over time not as fast. Over the winter and spring you need to try and get all the water out.

In this analogy you can imagine that fitness is never constant, it’s going up or it’s going down, but the whole is never sealed and your fitness is never constant. ( a poor design..)
In my case this means that even when I have started to train, the fact that I can’t train the same number of hours in the same intensity means i’m bailing out my canoe, but not as much water is being taken out or as fast, so as I begin training I can still be losing fitness from my base line, but not as fast as I was, this has manifested, but it’s all part of the process. Think about this with your training.

So how am I doing, well no more crutches, I was walking without them at 4 weeks, it’s now 5, I can train on the turbo for just over an hour and my last session was around 40 watts short of Jan 7th baseline.  Muscle atrophy in the left leg has been a challenge. Most of this happens in the first 10 days, so very difficult to manage, something to think more about in an injury situation.

And after seeing my surgeon the pin needs to come out in October he says, so at least I’ll get some riding in this year.

The Time trial toy project has started and I have included a Lamborghini style  teaser pic, with more of the build to follow. As ever looks of the bike are important.
So the comeback is under way, is it easy? no. Does it hurt? yes will I make it? Just watch me