Post-ultra-marathon blues

Bill Meisner talks about the long recovery from ultra-marathon muscular effort in "The Awful Afters."

Fear of puss!

(Google Images is interesting. When I googled puss, I mostly got pictures like these. When I realized I wanted pus, I got pictures so gross I didn’t want to look at them, much less post them. Which I guess is rather the point here.)

When I had my knee “done” (Mar. 6), the orthopædic surgeon said that I could swim all I liked until the stitches came out, and then I shouldn’t swim until the incisions fully healed. When my family doc pulled the stitches out (Mar. 16), she said I shouldn’t swim at all for two weeks. As I’ve posted below (here, here, and here), I’ve swum twice this week, and without benefit of bandages.

After I posted about it, monado called me, and pointed out that while an infection was very unlikely, its consequences would be terrible—so perhaps I should not swim for a few more days.

I took her advice. But at least I got out again for my one-mile walk-and-run loop, as I did two days ago. I had hoped that I might do a two-and-two, but as soon as I started running I knew that would be wrong. There wasn’t any pain, but my injured knee felt injured, so I limited it to the two-and-one thing, and I was, I think, fine. (As I type this, I’m in my hotel room, icing the knee prophylactically.)

Tomorrow is an off day as I fly home. I haven’t been upgraded, which I always find a disappointment. As I once read in the American Airlines in-flight magazine, frequent flyers live for their upgrades.

I am a runner!

Well, okay: I’m not as good-looking (or young!) as this guy; I’m not running in the fall somewhere (it’s March in the northern hemisphere); nor am I running so athletically.

But last night, about 5:45 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, in the City of Carson, County of Los Angeles, State of California, I “ran” pretty much exactly one mile on my reconstructed knee.

“Run” is a bit of an exaggeration: I’d walk two minutes, then run one. My knee never hurt, and afterwards I spent almost ninety minutes alternately heating and icing my knee. There was no swelling, then or now, 18 hours later.

I’m still pretty fit: but running-fit? Nah.

I wore my heart rate monitor, and during my little jogs my rate got up to 149 bpm!

During the run I could feel tightness in my leg above and below the knee. I wondered if this was from a year of having problems, and not running, because it wasn’t bad. And today I can “feel” my knee, but it’s nowhere near painful. If it’s okay this time tomorrow I may go out for a repeat.

Setback

Tuesday evening (March 13; I won’t remark on the number!) I had my first swimming lesson since my knee surgery.

I felt great. It wasn’t just the joy of working out; it was that my kicking felt so much better. My vertical kick, never that bad, was suddenly better. With better kicking (as any fan of Terry Laughlin’s Total Immersion technique knows) comes better body positioning which means better (or at least easier) swimming. (See the Wikipedia article on TI for a good summary of the criticisms of TI.)

About midway through our hour my knee began to hurt, and we switched to drills using a pullbuoy. But it was too late; after a week of wonderful recovery, my knee has been sore since. I took a couple of days off, and since then I’ve resumed light cycling. Yesterday I did another session of Coach Kelvin’s Triathlete Swim Training but only for half an hour. For one thing, trying to do stroke drills with a pullbuoy is (for me) nothing less than comical. I’ve also been babying the knee, spending hours each day alternating heat and cold.

I biked easily 40 minutes today (watching the last two stages of the 2004 Giro d’Italia on DVD). I think I’ll do an hour tomorrow, and then I fly to Los Angeles for a week of meetings with my client.

The week in Los Angeles I’ll be staying at the Doubletree Hotel Carson Civic Plaza (sic), whose pool I’ve described before. But an alternative to the Doubletree’s modest facilities is a brand-new 24 Hour Fitness facility about a mile from the hotel. The building looked great from the outside in January, but its home page doesn’t mention the pool I thought it had. Anyway, my plan is to swim a bit, pool-run a bit, walk a bit, and maybe even *gasp* run a bit. As with so much: We’ll see.

Back in the saddle …

First, an apology for using a cliché as my title; I couldn’t think of anything else.

Second, the pic is also just the best I could find. I’m not female, I don’t have long hair, and I was riding my old Trek 2200 (a diamond-frame road bike) on a Tacx Flow ergotrainer, but …

for the first time in six days, I worked out. And, to my pleasant surprise, my refurbished knee didn’t complain; indeed, it liked it!