Well, after a decent start to the season I'm going to have to take my medicine and rest up for a while. What started as a niggle in February, a pain in March and a load of ice packs and ibuprofen in April and revealed itself to be Achilles Tendonitis and a calf strain/tear.
My injury appears to have been caused by a couple of things:
1 - Biomechanics
2 - Not enough base work
3 - Not listening to my body
The biomechanics issue, which is just a hunch at this point based on some feedback that I've had from other riders and viewing forums on the internet, seems to be that my cleats are positioned slightly far forward on the shoe. Which seems to be causing more stress and tension on the Achilles tendon as it goes through a slightly larger rotation. I've corrected this and will report back later...
Base Work. Well, I took October, November and December completely off the bike then started back cold in January. January was reasonably sensibly paced, 20 and 30 mile rides. Building the power and duration. Then came February and the panic... I stuck in a 100 mile ride when I had no business to be thinking about it. The niggle appearing about 60 miles in.
Come March / April, I tried adding Power and I wasn't ready for it. There should have been another 1,000 miles in the legs before I started to put in hill sprints, but short sightedness took the eyes off the prize and I went straight for the fun stuff - balls out, HR bouncing off 180 and wanting to throw up. That saw me through race one but by race two I was taped up and firing on adrenalin... which is great at the time but doesn't help for the following two days when you struggle to walk up the stairs.
I had a crack at another Tuesday club session but the calfs were mooing a bit louder, cramping for the last 2 miles. I decided on a self imposed ban for a week to see how it recovered but 5 minutes into the next ride the herd were mooing again, so I called on a Physio who gave me a look over... Jeez that hour was painful, I didn't know a muscle could have so many knots in it. But after working through the knots, releasing the tension in the legs and finding out what else has to heal, I'm a lot closer to recovering part of the season than I would have been otherwise.
As they say, there's no such thing as a bad experience, just experience! Hopefully this is one I'll learn from... listen to the body!
RSS Feed