Wholly Training, Batman!!

Wow this has been a crazy week and a half. I went down to Southern Illinois with the Wildcard guys (and gal :D) and did two of three days of riding with them. I would have done all three days if I could get off work on Friday to go, but the person who was supposed to cover my shift quit. So thanks for leaving me stuck with that. It was probably for the best. I was fresh for the Saturday century that way. And the hill climb day Sunday. I made up for the lack of miles with the simple goal of blowing up my legs on the hills Sunday. It worked. The 20 miles back to homebase were pathetically slow, and even if I cared, I had no chance of keeping up. Thankfully Alexei felt the same way!

It was a great time, hills, booze, food, and bikes!!

Hand Update and Plans From Here

The hand has healed pretty well, I suppose. I got the sutures out, was given a lovely splint thing and told not to do anything "stupid." So I didn't tell them when I started riding my bike again with the splint on, and I certainly ignored the follow up appointment to be told that I was healing up well...not gonna spend $2000 for THAT valuable intel. Thanks. So this is how the thumb looks now:

It's more knobby than it was before, less flexible, and much more tempermental. Heat feels good, cold does not. It doesn't like mountain bike handlebars, and if I overdo, it lets me know. It's also kind of a sexy scar, if I do say so myself. If I ever got manicures, it would look kinda badass next to red nails. But I'm usually too lazy (efficient!) to get them. They just crack and come off anyways, right? I'm slowly losing the feeling that I'm going to fall on/stub/doanythingbad to it, and if it warms up here soon, I want and probably need to get out and mountain bike again since I'll probably be forever a chicken if I don't.

In other news, we have a definite new home post-Illinois. We are going to Canada! (eh) Yep folks, that's right. I'm actually really excited, for many reasons. For the first time in a while, I'll be doing school and um....actually using that grey matter in my head. So I'm a bit nervous but also super excited. I'm excited for the green spaces in Calgary, the beautiful mountains, and, yes, even the cold. I'm going to learn to cross country ski. Oh yeah and speed skate (because, you know, I'm totally good at not crashing). So I'd better improve my mountain biking skills, since there is real mountain biking in the Rockies as opposed to flat and sad Illinois. Just saying - Illinois MTB Champion is an oxymoron. That doesn't mean I can't at least work on it, though!

Effed Up Hand Update

I've successfully done it again: taken myself out of the game for two months. The thing is, I'm not all that pissed anymore. Sure, I'm bored and with the usual training load I would have, boredom was almost never an issue. But I kinda can't do much about it, anyways.

I had the hand surgically "fixed" on Friday. What does that mean, exactly? Well it means taking out whatever bones (I swear I remember hearing growth plates, but maybe, maybe not) had fallen INTO the thumb joint - the middle one - and repair the "shredded" tendon ligament that, you know, you NEED to have to use your thumb. So in theory it's back in place where it should be where the bones were keeping it from going before surgery. But I can't see it because it's wrapped up in plaster and gauze and ace bandages that make it look like my thumb is bigger than the rest of my hand. It twitches every once in awhile like it keeps hoping it's free, but alas, it is not.

So what does this mean for training, then? Well I can't do much till I have my follow-up appointment to get the sutures out and hopefully a removable thumb support. At that point I'm hoping I can start lifting (light) weights again and hit the pool. That's also when I'll start riding Skippy since I can - and have - ridden that bike one-handed. Otherwise I probably won't ride till two months is up. That sucks. I miss my bike(s).

Positive note: this totally gets me out of the embarrassing excuse of an attempt at snow sports when visiting the bf's family this winter. Because, you know, I can't be falling on my bum hand.

Slide, BOOM........Ouuuuuccchhhh

So it was an interesting Thanksgiving for me - with one hand! Yeah, I crashed yet again in spectacular fashion. Requiring an ER visit and the whole shebang. I'm definitely not happy about having broken myself yet again on a bike. This time it was on a much harder surface, too - slippery concrete.

This is how it happened: I went to the weekly UCR ride - the night ride around town on mountain, or in my case, my cross bike so that I can keep up without issue. We all met up, and not even five minutes in, we headed into the unnamed parking garage for our warmup. They all started taking off fast, so I joined in, not to be outdone as the only lady on a bike that night. On the second turn, I didn't even have time to react before I felt my head hit the concrete and myself slide for awhile. I came down on my left side, and I must have tried to catch myself with my right hand without realizing it, since that is the one I really messed up. I laid there for a few moments trying to gather what had just happened as I hear Dan start to make fun of me for going down - and my usual snarky responses were out of reach. My mind kept scanning my body to see what was wrong, which was when I realized that there was another body next to me. I was one of three or four that went down! And we weren't even going that fast!

It took a little bit for me to come back from lala land, and at that point I finally realized that my hand didn't feel right. Or look right, and it was still in my glove. I pulled it out very carefully and saw that my thumb was pointing in the wrong direction. The guys instantly said "Oh it's dislocated," so I was about to simply pull it back into place but they stopped me, probably for the better. Even though that's what the doctor ended up doing later that night at the hospital.

It was clear that they didn't believe me at the hospital - they asked quite the list of questions about any drug use and any "abuse at home" before even really giving me a look. They took xrays, gave me a "pain reliever" shot in the bum that did NO good whatsoever, and were about to splint it up and send me out before I protested that it was not in the right position. They finally backtracked and retook the xrays, this time with my good hand as a comparison. Then they claimed that the first set looked ok, but the second didn't. Probably because they hadn't actually looked at the first set.

That's when the doc decided it would be best to numb it with a shot and pull it back into place. That wasn't much fun, either, but at least it looked like it was more *normal* in position than before. Then they gave me the plaster splint that I'm not allowed to take off, and sent me home.

So then I had to cook all the Thanksgiving goodness we'd already went shopping for with a messed up thumb. Notthatmuchfun.

I didn't accidentally chop anything off, so that's a plus.

Four days post-crash and I can use my fingers better, but I don't particularly like to. And if I try to use the thumb it lets me know that's not OK. My hand is swollen to the point where I don't have knuckles anymore, and it's all purple-yellow grossness that you get when you bruise something good. The other bruises I got from the crash aren't all that bad - it seems that my hand absorbed 90% of the impact. Maybe it saved my collar bone, maybe not. I prefer to think it did.

Here's to hoping I don't need surgery. I go Wednesday to find out.

Gonna have to go see my massage therapist this week to get my angry muscles worked out, too.

Now I have to be more creative about getting my workouts in, but I'm mostly just hoping I can get back to swimming soon. I have the road bike on the trainer already, and it's going to be back to riding Skippy around town since I don't have to use my right hand on that bike. And I'm not really going to allow myself to run before I get *cracked* back into position.

Gotta work back into it yet again.

UCR November 16, 2011 by ablapat at Garmin Connect - Details

Night rides on bikes! Yes we were going everywhere. No, we didn't always have a clue as to where we were. It was a blast though.

Home from France and Spain!

I spent the last two weeks (as of last Thursday night, I've been home) in Europe. It was awesome. Though the one thing I have to say is that I'm so so tired of cigarette smoke. It seemed like everybody smokes there. Which made my nose hurt.

I got to ride a (very crappy and loose in all sorts of ways) bike in France and a different one (in better shape, slightly) in Spain. Didn't get pick pocketed, and I, at least, avoided food poisoning. My poor mother, notsomuch. I learned that while my favorite shoes are the cutest darn things ever, they are not so great for travel in as much as they started stinking to high heavens. And I can't decide if it's worth trying to wash them/sanitize them or just throw them out.

Maybe just toss them....

This week marks the official beginning of training bonanza 2011/2012. Starts with a whopping 8 hour training week. Haha I like the beginning.

Going a new direction

So since I've been sooooo so SO injured this year, since, ha oh yeah, February...ok that basically makes my whole season the time of being injured...I'm going to take a different approach. I'm going to start running barefoot. No biking, obviously, but running. Why, you ask? Isn't that dangerous? Hmmmm no. Here's why.

The body has the most amazing ability to adapt to it's environment. When it's not important or useful to be strong in some areas, those areas get weak while the areas that need to be strong get stronger based on the forces and work subjected to that particular part of the body. What this means is that the feet, that which supports your whole body need to be strong. What we've done by wearing shoes is confine them and not allow them to be the awesome adaptive tools that they are. We instead engineer padding and "support" under the arches to keep them from flexing. But the arch flexes because it is designed to do that. So since your foot isn't taking the hits, what is? Your legs....really it makes perfect sense. At least, it really resonates with what I've experienced running in my nice and supportive winter training shoes all last winter. And then ended up with seemingly chronic overuse injuries all year. And by chronic I mean one after another after another after another....very very frustrating.

I'm not quite as eloquent as explaining it as this guy is. What it breaks down to is that I'm giving up on running like I've been running for the last couple years. Hasn't worked. Everything else seems ok, just the running isn't good. So, I've really got nothing to lose on it since I've hit this impenetrable barrier on my running speed. Just can't train enough speed to get faster because I get injured just from building up the base to properly do the speed I need to do. Boooo. So I'm only going to build base via bicicleta and build up my running distances based on what my (barefoot) feet allow. Which means I don't have to spend another $100 on some foamy running shoes that only last me a few months. And I'll of course lift weights and build my core strength to address inherent imbalances and improve power yadda yadda yadda. If it ends up being a bad winter and biking is off the table, I'll have to track down some snowshoes and hit the cornfields or something. And hit the pool since that'll be indoors...and there's a sauna in there too...hehe....

Heading to France on Friday this week...three days till I fly out!! Should be a stellar trip with my mommy :)