Good knee news .. but no race on Sunday

Went to the doctor to let him have a look at my knee. Mainly, I wanted to make sure what was going on and if this would have an impact on my next season’s Ironman plans …

It was the first time I went to this specific doctor, but felt very comfortable. He manipulated my knee quite a bit, but other than the swelling and the resulting inability to properly bend and extend the knee, it wasn’t too uncomfortable. He then went on to take ultrasound pictures and soon gave me the good news that my knee was okay. Based on what he was telling me, I had torn my posterior cruciate ligament twelve years ago, which is something that is not operated on even today. So absolutely no need for an operation.

But what caused the swelling? Based on the ultrasound, I had torn some muscle fibers in my quadriceps muscle which caused a lot of fluid build-up. Here’s the picture:

I’m not sure I got everything he explained, but here’s as best as I understood it. The picture is taken from the knee (on the top right you can still see a bit of the kneecap) up the femur. The top is where my skin is, the bottom goes “into” the thigh towards the bone. On the bottom you can see the femur, on the top you can see the quadriceps. In between is a big “black hole” which is the fluid that has built up.

This fluid will get slowly absorbed by the muscle and weaken the muscle for a bit. Therefore, even when the swelling is gone, the muscle is not yet back to its original strength, it takes a bit longer for the muscle to properly heal.

He estimates about two weeks for the swelling to be completely gone. I can slowly start some training once I can fully extend the knee, but I should start slowly and carefully in order not to hurt the muscle again (like I did last time). A start in Ratzeburg this Sunday is totally out of the picture, I wouldn’t be able to run very well and would be in grave danger to really hurt myself. (Plus, it won’t be any fun at all to have an injury “out in the boonies”.) So I’ll give myself some extra rest this time and figure out how to get back on track during December.

Some good news and some bad news. But I’m totally relived that it’s not anything serious, and that I can still go ahead with my racing plans for 2010!

.. still on!

Another setback

On Friday, I hurt my knee again. Not a chance of running this weekend .. probably means that I can forget my race next Sunday in Ratzeburg. I’m really pooped and disappointed.

But now the first order of business is to find out  what’s causing this and what I can do about it. There’s no way I can train for an  Ironman like this. So I’ve scheduled an doctor’s appointment tomorrow. Hopefully he can give me some more background on what is going on.

In the meantime, I’m reading up on knee injuries, ACL tears and so on. Not exactly encouraging literature …

Weighty Issues – Mid November Update

After taking a little injury break, it’s time to fess up … so here is my latest update from the weight front.

Another photo by radialmoster

Official weigh in Nov 16th: 88.3kg; 17.7% body fat

My goal was to get under 88kg at the end of October. I was hovering around that mark when I hurt my knee, and had a full week of no sport, “tricky situations” with a business trip and conference, and quite a bit of worries and frustration. Then another week of slowly ramping up my training, so I’ve lost two full weeks (which corresponds to one pound at my goal rate of 1kg a month). No magic is going to help me get that back, so I’m relaxing my goals a little bit .. as December will be a bit tricky as well, I’m shooting for under 87kg at the end of December now.

Of course, I’m a bit disappointed, but I think I have realized where my mistakes were and am ready to be better. The frustration led to some poor decisions, but I’ve also gotten a bit less strict in my diet. This makes it hard to get the weight down, especially around all the extra goodies that float around at this time of the season. So, I have to save the treats for the special occasions and not make them a regular, almost daily occurrence.

What has me a bit puzzled is that my weight seems to be moving all over the place. I’m stepping on the scales almost every morning, and I’m seeing shifts of three to four pounds from one day to the next. While some of this is pretty normal, I don’t really have a good explanation for these larger movements, sometimes I eat pretty late in the day, sometimes I have to get up a bit earlier and so on. But four pounds?! All of this makes it pretty tricky to evaluate where I am which sometimes gives me an extra excuse (or extra frustration) for another goodie. Weird.

I’m a bit worried that all my lofty weight goals are starting to get eroded little by little. At the end of last season I had identified weight as one of the areas I have to work on, and I hope I can remain committed to my goals of getting down to a decent race weight by summer. I hope that making my goals public in this blog helps me keep myself honest and focused on this goal. Hopefully, with my knee better, I can get back on track. I’ll keep you posted …

Fun Fall Run

The last few days, I had a chance to finally do some decent training. My knee was feeling better, and the whole week was full of little successful tests if the knee is okay. Unfortunately, I was stuck in Hamburg because some trains weren’t running, so I missed my regular winter Friday general conditioning session.

By Saturday, I was really anxious for a harder run. But first things first, I had to get our garden in winter shape with my wife. The weather didn’t fully cooperate, but we got the job done when it was getting dark. So that meant another headlamp run. I wasn’t really sure what was going to happen when I turned up the pace, so I had decided to test the waters with something demanding, but not too fast: 3* (1k@Marathon pace, 1k@ 1/2 marathon pace), all run without a break. It went really well, running fast wasn’t a problem, and I was able to crank it up even a bit faster on the last interval (4:27/k as per the Garmin).

For Sunday, we were expected at my Mom’s for lunch, so I used that for a longer run. It’s about 10k to them, but I can add some little extras to make it anywhere between a one or two hour run without too much effort. I slept a bit too long for a really long run, but it was to be the longest run since starting training after my vacation in August, so I took my iPod, my FuelBelt with some water and Clif ShotBlocks and a camera – so this post will have a lot of pictures.

From the start, the sun was out and quite some traffic on the trails:

(If you look closely, you can see some mountain bikers that had just overtaken me.) It was really beautiful today. Most of the leaves were already down, but the sun was out in full force, and it was quite warm for Mid-November - 12°C, about 55°F. Usually it’s about 5°C (40°F) and gloomy grey skies with some fog. This was a lot better:

It was a bit tricky to see the trail with all the leaves, but it made for some soft running. After some nice trails, I ran along a forest road in glorious sunshine:

It’s a bit tricky to see, but although we don’t have any mountains were I live, there is a lot of up and down .. hopefully that helps me get stronger for the next season!

After the forest, there was a bit of open fields, then some more steep trails
a river crossing and then the next forest

The sun was still out in full force and it was getting quite warm. As I was getting closer to where my parents live, the traffic was picking up again:

But I can live quite well with horses and a little family as companions on the trail!

The run was over almost too soon. I tacked on a little extra loop and ended then run after just under 1:30h. Without really noticing, I had picked up the pace a bit and ended up with a 5:30 average pace (as compared to my typical 6:00 min/k pace on longer runs). The last few k’s were even close to 5:00 pace!

All in all, a great run. I didn’t think too much about my knee, and I even though at times I listened hard for any pain or instability, I didn’t notice anything. I guess I’m on for Ratzeburg, though it’s hard to guess where I’m at. Some predictions have to wait for the week before the race!

Slowly getting back on track

The picture in this post is a cool word-art of all the words in my blog’s feed, done on http://www.wordle.net/create. I really like what you can do on this site!

I hope that my knee swelling was nothing more than a little scare. I took a whole week off, but I got more and more movement back. By Saturday, I was so ready to get back to running, but anxious that my knee would act up and I’d have to turn around after a few minutes. Luckily, everything felt okay and I ran for 30 minutes without any problems. On Sunday, I did another 40 minutes, and was quite relieved.

I’m giving myself this week to get back in shape and will not do anything really hard. (Today’s one hour run was quite sufficient to get me tired, thank you.) This will give me about ten hard days (a week and two weekends) to get in shape for Ratzeburg, but at this point I’m just happy if I can continue to train for IM Germany next summer. I’ll reassess what I can do in Ratzeburg after that.

The one thing that really bugs me is that in my frustration I neglected to take care of my nutrition. I’ve also had quite a bit of work to do and went on a business trip on Thursday and Friday. I haven’t gained too much weight (and it’s coming off quickly now that I’m running again), but my weight loss goals for October and probably also for November are out of the window. I'll write my “weighty issues update” next weekend, but I’m already setting things back a bit. Strange how these things take a back seat when other, more important issues are coming up …

For now, being able to run again is the most important thing. I was really missing that feeling of strapping on the shoes and getting some fresh air! Now, if I was only as fast as this guy …