This would normally be the time and place to post about how well my training is going, and that I'm hoping to run well in the autumn marathons that I have coming up. There was an enforced change of plans a couple of weeks back, though - had an accident on my cycle commute to work (going past a queue of stationary traffic, a car pulls through a gap in the queue to go into the supermarket on the left (not aware that I'm approaching), I don't have enough time to stop and go into the side of the car) with no obvious damage at the time (to the car I hit, my bike or myself other than a few bumps and scrapes), but increasing pain in my left calf over the next few days, to the point where it was sore to walk, to go up on my toes or flex my foot towards my knee, suggested that I hadn't been as lucky as I had thought. A visit to the physio suggested that I had a (relatively small) tear in my calf muscle, which would probably take a few weeks to heal, and then a bit more time to get back into running again.
There's never a good time for something like this to happen, but this was a particularly bad time with several races that I had been looking forward to coming up - the trip to Inverness for the Loch Ness Marathon on the weekend just past didn't happen (although the unexpected free weekend meant that I was able to help out at Portobello parkrun on Saturday and the Scottish 10k on Sunday), and there won't be consecutive weekends of running around a large body of water (Kielder Water on 7th October, then Loch Rannoch on the 14th), or an early start for a long run from Killin to Strathyre and back with the Glen Ogle 33. I've also cancelled the SVN 10 in 10 in late November/early December - while I expect to be running by then, it's probably asking too much to run a reasonably long distance on 10 consecutive days so soon after an enforced break of several weeks. (I'm not saying that I couldn't do it, just that there's too much risk of injury, particularly given my past record in the longer multi-day series that I've tried...)
It was tempting to get angry about missing out on these opportunities, and about missing several events that I was looking forward to, but that isn't going to change anything - I'm still going to be injured - and potentially be counterproductive. The more constructive reaction kicked in fairly soon afterwards, though - while it's obviously not ideal to not be able to run or cycle for a while, the enforced break is an opportunity to take a step back and think for the longer term (for a change - there are several issues with running marathons every few weeks, like that it's very hard to think beyond the next race meaning that the focus is always in the short term, you're continually either tapering or recovering with little opportunity for quality training, and it's hard to make time for any training that isn't running, like stretching, foam rolling, or core strength and stability work). It also helped to change the way that I think about my situation - I've been guilty in the past of thinking only about what I'm not able to do when I've been injured, but it's much more positive and productive to look at what you can do (even if your choice is limited). There are plenty of core exercises that I've been able to do - an opportunity to work on an area that I know that I've been neglecting (and maybe get into some good habits that I'll be able to maintain going forward?) - and I've been doing quite a bit of single-leg cycling on the trainer.
While this has been useful in a few ways (a way of getting some decent cardio-based exercise to keep things ticking over, some useful feedback on pedalling technique), it has been interesting to see the world of Zwift from a slightly different perspective. I'm a relatively strong rider when fully healthy, with functional threshold power (FTP - the amount of power that you can hold on an all-out effort over 60 minutes) of around 265 watts, or a little over 4 watts per kilo of body weight, so most of the group rides available on Zwift are relatively comfortable for me. That power output has obviously been a lot lower while I've been cycling with my right leg only - it took a bit of getting used to, but I settled in at around 120W being fairly comfortable and anything over 150W requiring a fairly significant effort. This meant that it ended up being a real challenge to stay with the group on rides that I would normally have passed over as not giving me enough of a workout. I also ended up having to mentally recalibrate my expectations of how long it would take me to cover a given route - the KoM on the Innsbruck UCI Worlds lap, for example, went from 25 minutes at a fairly comfortable pace to 40 minutes of solid effort - and helped with motivation, as all of the familiar virtual roads felt subtly different (almost like everything had been scaled up - the loops being that bit longer, and the hills higher), and I was able to set myself tough but achievable goals on every session.
It's now almost three weeks since my accident, and my recovery seems to be going reasonably well - have been able to walk without any pain for the last few days, and have tried some gentle (two-legged!) cycling without any reaction afterwards. I have another appointment at the physio tomorrow, so will see how things go there...
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