100% or Nothing

Unfortunately I’m now injured.  Last Thursday night the team headed up to Boulder for the Thursday night Stroke and Stride.  It’s a 2 lap swim and short beach run between laps.

Finishing the 1st lap, I was swimming well and doing all I could to get up to the Matt Balzer, Brad Zoller, Dan MacKenzie lead group.  I got out of the water and ran on the beach to start my 2nd lap.  I thought “hmm, I shoulf run as close to shore as possibly, run the tangent, and catch those guys.”  Just as I was about to run back into the water I stepped into a hole, landed straight legged, heard some nasty noises from me knee, and fell to the ground.

Thankfully, former pro triathlete Wes Hobson heard the nasty sounds and ran over to help me out.  He got me into the cool water and ran off to get the race parademics.  Much thanks Wes.  The paramedics thought I should get it looked at but didn’t insist on taking me to the hospital themselves.

I got an X ray the next day and was looking at it myself thinking, it looks ok to me, maybe I’ll be back in a week.  But once Matt Schneider at the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine looked at it he saw right away that I had fractured my tibial plateau.  Apparently the femur comes down on the tibia and “the femur always wins” in the words of Matt.  The good news is that as of now it looks like there isn’t much ligament damage so once the bone heals I’ll hopefully be 100% (much thanks to Matt for taking the time out of his weekend and calling me at 7:30 on Friday night with that good news).

All this got me thinking about the fragility of the body.  The body is so efficient, that every body part is critical, and when one part goes the whole system can go down.  My fracture is tiny, perhaps the area of the fracture is the area of a couple of nickels.  But that’s enough to shut me down from training for about 6 weeks.

The hard thing to deal with is that 99.9% of my body is incredibly fit right now.  My muscles are strong, blood loaded with endurance goodness, but with those bad nickles in there none of it matters.  My fitness will fade and I’ll have to put in some serious work to get back to where I am today.

The good thing is that I went through something similar once before.  My only other real injury in years of endurance racing was a stress fracture to the same tibia in my senior year of college.  Once I got it, I did nothing for a couple of weeks to let my body heal during the hardest period.  Then I the cross training hard, I started pool running (for some pathetic reason swimming didn’t even cross my mind even though it’s a superior activity in my mind now) and got my first road bike and hit the roads of Boston.  I started running in early January and by early February I ran 8:20 for 3k, a PB.

I’m keeping this in mind as I’m dealling with this injury.  I’m hoping to swim in 2 weeks, bike in 4, run in hopefully 6, race in 8, and be back on my game in 10.

Thankfully I’ve got Amy taking great car of me.  Mix1 smoothis, Calcium pills, chocolate.  All I need to get better.