Back - to Normal

 What Fun!

 

If you have been following my blog you know that last April I put my back out of kilter. Not a fall. Not from over training. All it took was a return to sitting cross-legged on the floor after a year of sitting exclusively in chairs and sofas, while maintaining a normal training load. My hip flexors did not like it and pulled my sacrum out of position.

This type of injury takes a long time to heal. At first I tried training through it with very easy bike and swim activity, and while at first there was improvement, it all went south again. After that I went to see my acupuncture guy, Mike Zanoni, and just did the morning flex routine my physical therapist Sonya at FluidBody Training prescribed. That continued until the last week of May, when I began to water jog and do thirty minutes slow cruising on the bike. 

From mid-July on I have gradually gone back to normal training. The big thing I noticed was a lack of endurance. Even a thirty minute run felt hard. But I could feel my strength returning. Last Sunday I rode for 2:30 including the Makapu’u lookout, and it didn’t kill me. This past Sunday I ran for 1:30 and felt fine.

Besides feeling weak, the other thing I noticed was that my training zones are off. Way off. On the bike and run I am going easy just like always, and feel like I should be in low zone 2, but my Garmin says I am in zone 4, which would be going flat out. This means my heart is beating faster than it used to for the same effort. Could be lack of fitness. Could be SVC.

So, in light of that I have scheduled my standard run and bike zone setting workouts for this week. The first test will be if I have enough stamina to get through them. If I do, well, I will have to wait and see what the data says.