Sidelined

I'm pretty sure that the last post I wrote was a whole pile of moaning about how I've not been comfortable riding the bike.

Little did I realise how much more that was to become.

I never thought I'd be an athlete, doing those things that athletes do, like stretching, and eating exercise food, drinking protein powder - and I certainly never thought I'd be seeing a sports doctor to get steroid injections to address physical injuries arising from the stress of what I've been putting myself through.

Around 300 days ago (not that I'm counting) I had a... mishap.

I was commuting home, just got back on the bike after moving house (and a bunch of kms further away from work), and was in the process of indicating to cross the highway to take the turn off to my suburb - because in New Zealand we put street lights along our motorways rather than these fancy 'interchange' things that are only just starting to catch on.

I'm not sure exactly what happened after that - I had my arm out and checked behind me to see if there was any traffic coming, then I hit the ground. I don't know if it was a catseye, or a slippery white line - perhaps I just lost my balance, or maybe one of these things happened and my arm couldn't take the strain of only having one hand on the bars...

Whatever did happen I hit the ground with my left elbow at around 40km/h.

I felt like I'd been dropped on my head - having actually been dropped on my head once I can testify that it was a very similar feeling. I kinda blanked out, and then came to in absolute terror as I realised I was laying in the middle of the motorway, which I will be eternally thankful was void of traffic.

The initially obvious mess was all the superficial stuff - the expected stuff like torn sleeves on my long cycling shirt, gravel firmly embedded in the bloody mess that was my elbow and knee, and the less expected like the holes in the top of my gloves (imagine you are holding a cup - the area on the base of your thumb which is facing towards the ceiling) and the scuffs on the face-plates for my shifters. Apparently I'd forgotten to let go of the bars when I fell off.

But it appeared that I was ok, and I was mostly concerned about the bike - had I cracked the frame on my new carbon steed? Would I ever live it down if I had, let alone be able to replace it? What ammunition had I handed my esteemed workmates for their humourous scathing comments?

I rode the last couple of kms home with a sore arm, a bit of a dripping bloody mess, left arm refusing to function correctly, and made the painful grind up my, thankfully short, 10+% driveway. I reported my injuries to my beloved, and based on my current position amongst the living and considerable inability to remember exactly what happened I'm guessing the berating and flogging weren't fatal.

It was sure sore (the injury, not the marital justice), but it wasn't Emergency Room urgent - it just seemed to be a good old dose of road rash and a mild case of bruised pride. I took a concrete pill along with a handful of anti-inflammatories, cleaned up, and got some rest.

The next few days were train days as I couldn't move my left shoulder properly. I saw my physio the next day and it was assessed that I'd done some pretty good damage, but not broken anything... I was under the assumption that it would go away, and a few weeks later it seemed to settle itself down and I was away laughing.

Or so I thought.

A few months later I decided to do Taupo, and started riding more intensely. Instead of riding to town and back I was putting in long efforts and hill climbs, sprints and max efforts here and there... pretty much doubling the amount of riding I'd been doing. I started to notice that my shoulder would complain after the long weeks, and then occasionally - usually when I had to put in quick reactions to keep balance on the bike, like correcting for a bump in the road - I would get huge pains.

This continued for a few weeks as winter started, until one week I had a few separate incidents in the work car-park, which is notoriously slippery-when-wet, where I was left with pain in my shoulder for the rest of the day, so I figured it was time to get some more physio.

I got a new physio at the recommendation of The Engineer, and started on those rubber band exercises, the light weight lifting, and as the weeks went by I noticed an increase in strength, and a constant increase in pain levels, until two weeks ago when I got to the point where I simply couldn't ride.

And I've been off the bike for two weeks.

I guess should have been more diligent when I had the original accident - something that I now know and won't let pass me by again.

I got a referral from Mr Physio for x-ray and ultrasound and and appointment to see the Sports Doc, whom I saw today.

After a thorough examination and consultation of the pictures he and confirmed what we thought - that I'd torn a tendon, and my bursar was inflamed due to the darn thing rubbing against it - likely in part having been aggravated by the strengthening exercises that I've started doing.

The theory is that when I planted my elbow into the road at 40kmh that my shoulder got shocked upwards upwards, my bursa got a massive bash, and my subscapularis tendon tore near the rotator-cuff while taking the strain of the impact. The tear is currently around 6mm long - and that's after 9 months of theoretical healing.

The remedy for this is more physio and an injection of cortisone as an anti-inflamatory to get the bursar to settle the heck down. I half expected the cortisone injection.

What I didn't expect was to get it while I was getting the consult done.

I hate needles at the best of times, and when Sports Doc bought out the needles I almost fainted. I started rambling like a crazed idiot and sweating like I was in a sauna. I did do Sports Doc the decency of explaining that this is how I, apparently, deal with panic and unexpected injections, and our combined laughing at my antics helped calm me so he could stick me with the darn thing. Thankfully he numbed the site with anesthetic as well so I didn't really feel anything as he did his thing, which seemed to take a long time, and then it turned out he was still waiting for me to stop rambling so he could stick me without being distracted.

And there was no topical anesthetic.

Ouch.

10 days off the bike then I should be good to go, and in 4 weeks I get another examination to determine if the steroids actually did what they were supposed to do.

Now it's one thing to have all this happening, but at the same time I've spent the last two weeks not riding, and when  you're doing upwards of 15 hours a week on the bike suddenly dropping to 0 hours has a surprisingly profound effect on your mood.

I'm still eating like I burn 4000 calories a day and I can actually see my stomach getting fatter. I've gone through mild depressive states bordering on deeper-than-mild, been irritable, slept really badly, and - of all things - started drinking coffee. I think the coffee gives me the adrenaline boost that I'm missing... or I hate myself, it's hard to tell. I've even considered taking up running - that's how desperate things are becoming.

The timeline for Taupo was also looking pretty shocking for a while there - originally it was looking like 6 weeks to see the sports doc, and after that another week to see the local outpatients for the injection - then 10 days on top of that, and rehabilitation on top of that... I was starting to get worried that I wouldn't be doing Taupo at all.

It also wasn't going to be helping matters that I have another bike fit this weekend to try to sort out problems I've been having with pain in my leg. There was one small point where I was almost... almost tempted, to throw the bike out the window and take up restoring antique siege weapons.

But all is not lost, and I've learnt two valuable things;

Don't wait on injuries, and don't give up on them either.

27 Jul 2016 No comments

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You just go faster

The challenges I've been facing so far in my preparation for Taupo have been physical and, to a point, intellectual. Hills that never end. Headwinds that suck your soul and then demand more. Fridges that never hold enough food. Things that can be solved by observing our honourable Rule 5. I've also had to research into everything from bike fits, to components, to nutrition; filtering through endless opinions, points of views, advertising and, when it comes to nutrition; pop-science - debunked or otherwise. It's relatively hard gaff, can be frustrating, but it's doable - you can kinda train yourself for this type of thing and bite it off in chunks; plus it doesn't matter too much if you get it wrong because unless you are doing something really really wrong it's hard not to get a second shot at what you have for breakfast.

All this is pretty normal now, but recently I've been blind-sided by the Mental Game.

When I started on this crazy journey I was all of the opinion that 'it's only 320km' - it's a couple of long rides thrown together - I've got plenty of time to train and all the support I need to do everything necessary. It didn't seem that hard, certainly not on paper, and that fire burnt hot for a long time, slowly getting me into this whole fine mess.

But in the last few weeks my optimism started to slip.

It wasn't anything in particular - it just slowly ebbed away, piece by piece, until half way up Sweetacres Drive in Belmont the other day and I found myself lagging, grinding, hurting everywhere. I felt like I wasn't moving, and I was so frustrated I got to the point where I was considering just tossing my bike over the fence, and walking home.

It's been lots of little things chipping away at my gleeful bike riding. Some of these I might be giving more weight to than they're worth, and some which I might not have fully realised the importance of - this in itself, knowing what is upsetting my game, is something of an art-form that I'm still learning - just in life in general.

My woes are endless... let me tell you of them...

My bike still hurts to ride - I went through the process of getting a fit done and I've ended up with a severe pain in one leg that is fleeting but almost debilitating when it strikes. I can't tell if it is a fit thing or something else I've done and broken, but with my fitter based in Christchurch, and my fit measurements having been written down seemingly incorrectly after the last fit, it's proving hard for us to work out what the problem could be - if it is even specifically related to my bike fit. Moral of this story is probably to use someone local...

My overall enthusiasm isn't helped by a few unsavoury experiences I've had on the road with other road users behaving badly. It's to be expected to a point - especially if you're doing several hundred kms on the road each week - that you'll run into something less than ordinary at some point. New Zealand is slowly evolving to be cycling friendly, and for the most part people are good regardless, but when they're not it's positively perilous. I followed this one up with a post on Facebook after I had about 6 run-ins in one night, but it feels like I'm pissing in the wind a bit - and it's effectively impossible to avoid traffic if you're a road rider.

It is also the onset of winter at the moment, so it's dark and cold /all the the time/, and the weather for the last few weeks has been simply /breathtaking/; solid headwinds in every direction; cold damp and slippery on all the riads; crazy windy rain... thunderstorms and lightening - the lightening was so frequent I actually thought I'd get fried if I took myself out on that day. Some mornings I just want to stay in bed rather than get up and go for that 80km hill ride, even though I do go for the ride in the end.

My weight is annoying me - basically because it isn't going down, which means I'm carrying all this extra... stuff... around everywhere I go. When I think about myself from a logical perspective and compare myself to other people I know - I'm think I'm doing all right, and size isn't everything, really. 300km and up to 15 hours each week on the bike, decent average speeds, lots of hill climbing... I'm mostly able to keep up with The Tester and The Engineer; and the measurements say that I'm loosing fat and theoretically gaining muscle even though my weight isn't changing all that much.

I was decently overweight when I started riding - around 100kgs - and had managed to get back to that weight when I came out of a tasty pie and wine-laden Christmas. Upon deciding I was going to do this enduro event I wasn't the lightest cookie. More specifically, though, my belly gets in the way when I'm riding. I have trouble physically getting into the drops because of my 'spare tyre', and combining that with a bikefit that doesn't seem right... it's antagonising. It's not just a physical problem - logically I know that will go away - especially if I keep up this madness - but this is barrier that I can't get around. If it was a hill I could climb it, if it was cold fingers I could get some new gloves - losing fat isn't anywhere as easy to quantify or control, so I'm relegated to watching the scales get slowly lower and the pants get slowly looser. I did have to buy new shorts recently, but on the other hand my next-size-down jeans don't fit because my thighs are too bloody big.

This is what it is like in my head - it's like listening to a big constant despairing whinge, and I have to say that I'm not terribly proud of it, but it is something that is, well... happening. These things play on my mind and affect my performance simply because my mind isn't able to cope. A bike fit that doesn't work is a disincentive to ride simply because it is going to hurt - bad drivers are a reason to avoid being on the road... or at least a distraction from putting in effort because I'm too busy looking over my shoulder, and the weather... can't do anything about winter but it has an effect on people, and even if those people aren't me it can still have an impact - if the kids are under the weather I'm not about to dump them on B and leave them to it while I go out for the day.

It all contributes to the Mental Game, and the largest part of that, for me is the perception of something resembling progress.

This is a classic in cycling, and luckily there's plenty of commentary about it. It is quite simply the problem that resulted in the following quote:

"It never gets easier, you just go faster" - Greg Lemond

Damnit Mr Lemond, you're right.

When I'm riding, the level of effort I'm putting out is - usually - directly proportional to how long I think I will ride for. In the case of hills it's usually the minimum possible effort required to go up the damn thing and not fall off the bike - but it amounts to the same thing; that I'm outputting as much as I have at any given point in time. Because I'm always going flat-stick and going as hard as I can, I'm always giving it everything I have, and it always feels the same to me, regardless of what the actual speeds are - and so it never gets easier.

So how does one track improvement? Personal records are about the only tool I have to hand to see how well I am doing, and they are based on time, and therefore speed, alone - the amount of time it takes to smash out that climb, or how long it takes me to get to work in the morning - but these records are fickle beasts as they don't take into account fitness, freshness, adverse weather (including those pesky headwinds).

When I break it down, at the end of the day; it is always just as hard as it was last time. And so I get to the point where I was at the top of Sweetacres Drive; driving into an unforgiving headwind, in complete dispair and ready to throw the bike into the sea...

And it turns out I'd actually set a Personal Record that was nearly 12.5% faster than my previous record, which I set back in 2014, and over 20% better than anything I've set this year.

You just go faster

In the time since this fateful ride I've had to think about this more than anything else. I know I am getting fitter, and I can see that I'm getting faster. My bibs don't fit like they used to... Getting to know these signs and heavily reading between the lines, and remembering that I'm here for the endurance game - this isn't always about going fast; it's also about how long I can go for.

I also have to give big ups to The Tester, The Colleague, The Engineer, and B; for listening to me talk through it and giving me all the support. Thanks for dragging me up the hills guys.

My next long ride will be my longest since I started 'officially' training this year - 120km. Not long by any stretch of the imagination; but still the longest so far. And the proof of me actually progressing?

It isn't going to seem that far.

80kms is practically nothing now - I get back from an 80km ride feeling refreshed and ready to get on with the day, 120 will just be a bit longer - like 80kms used to be. This month, so far, I've ridden 1250 kms, and I've still got a few days to go. This is by far the longest month I've ever ridden. Now, some of this will be the good grace of the weather, health, and family - but I reckon it's still a pretty decent distance for a guy who still has a relatively normal life.

Again, 1250kms isn't a lot if you measure me up against any number of other riders out there, but it's progress. I can almost imagine upcoming months where I'll be doing nearly 2000kms, and the same rule will apply...

It won't get easier!

26 May 2016 No comments

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Bike Fit

Cycling isn't inherently comfortable. There are so many things that can hurt when riding, and as one accumulates years, so one accumulates... 'aches and pains'.

But there is pain, and then there is pain. (There is also the other pain - the feeling of parts of your body that have had their structural integrity compromised... but I think our imaginations have this one covered, and I'm going to leave this one out so I don't tempt fate.)

There is what I would consider to be fairly normal pain. The post-training-week bruised feeling of thighs that feel like they've been used as punching bags. That general overall feeling of dehydration and gnawing hunger that is only sated by the pizza and beer that your Top Secret Trainer has 'recommended' you avoid. The two-days-later ache of giving it everything you've got (and then forgetting to stretch), and the infamous burn of just going as hard as you possibly can.

I'm led to believe these things are character building, and have something to do with the general concept of getting fitter. For these, I'm told, the cure is a good stretch, some rest now and then, and a heaped teaspoon of cement powder stirred thoroughly into a hot cup of coffee, once per day (or as required), to improve intestinal fortitude.

Then there are the niggly pains. The ones that creep in over time, or don't even seem to be related to cycling at all. The ones that can't simply be attended to by meditating on Rule 5. Toes and fingers that go slightly numb, shoulders that seem to retain some form of tension that indicates they've forgotten to relax in the last week or so and make it hard to get comfortable on the bike. The hips hurt, the lower back burns, stabbing pains in the knees and a constant aches in the triceps, and it can get bad enough to suck the life out of you. Over time a couple of things seem to happen - either you get used to it, which isn't always a good thing - or it simply never stops hurting, and possibly gets worse as time goes on.

All this makes it painful to ride a bike for any amount of time. We spend hours on road bikes in one of a few pretty silly positions, physically, and when it isn't comfortable... well it can literally be a pain in the arse.

And that is why we, apparently, invented bike fits... and I've had one on my List Of Many Things as something to get done well in advance of Taupo.

I've never felt that my bike was quite right. The general size and shape of it fulfils a bunch of basic requirements - two wheels where you'd generally expect them to be and a couple of other handy components that, for the most part, make it go forward and around corners. It was also infinitely more comfortable than the last bike I'd ridden - the one The Engineer had lent me for approx 2500km. The thing that bugged me was the little things - the exact positioning of the components - it never quite felt quite right to me, and while I could probably tweak it myself, I'm not exactly sure where to start, so I've been intending to get someone with a vast amount of experience to, basically, do it for me.

When I purchased my bike I was given a bike fit. This was after I'd agreed to purchase the bike - a decision that I'd made based on a bit of research that, in itself, might be topic of another blog post altogether. Save to say that the basic requirements at that time were price and the frame has to be the 'right' size.

This original fit went rather smoothly. Nothing needed swapping out, all the parts were exactly the right size for me, and the bike seemed, magically, to be exactly what I needed. A couple of washers were added to the pedals to space them a bit wider, but that was about it. I rode away from that with a bike that seemed to fit exceptionally well and rode it for months, quite happily. But I also rode away with this idea ticking at the back of my mind - a feeling that it was all too easy. Like going to a tailor to get a tailor-made suit and being handed one off the rack that is, according to the tailor, exactly the right fit.

Purchasing a bike before getting fit for it wasn't necessarily the cleverest of ideas, but you need a bike to get fit to, and if you get the wrong bike you'll end up having to get another one. At least the second time around you'll know what you need to get. I'm now realising that I don't know how you'd step into this cycle without buying a bike fairly blindly in the first place... perhaps some clever person has come up with an answer for that?

Because I've been getting uncomfortable on the bike, and because of the lingering feeling that it might have not been set up in the first place, I asked around about bike fitters and The Colleague, as full of awesome advice as ever, recommended Anthony from Bikefitter. I looked the guy up, and found that Anthony is a cyclist, a physiotherapist, and a bike fit expert. He's also a bloody nice guy to work with. Friendly, knowledgeable, and refreshingly straightforward.

And he wasn't invested in selling me any parts.

Anthony works out of Christchurch and does a few fits a week as a part of his practice as a sports physioherapist. Luckily for the rest of us he also does a world-tour of New Zealand once every three months or so, and I managed to catch him while he was up in Wellington last week. While travelling he bases his fits out of a friends' garage, which sounds sparse - but to me is the quintessential bike experience - setting up your bike in the garage with a mate seems the exactly the right way to do it.

I was slightly nervous going in - the fear that I'd be told that I had to replace my whole bike because it wasn't going to be suitable for me, or what I wanted to use it for - the concern that I'd have another "na mate, looks like it's all set up pretty sweet aye" bike fit and waste my cash. My nervousness probably didn't show though - even though the first time I went up to meet Ant I actually forgot to take my bike with me. Thankfully I only left it on the car so didn't have that far to go and get it!

We got down to it, and the rest of the evening was a blur of video cameras, dots, allen keys, callipers and the fan-blades of a stationary trainer. We talked a lot, lots of things were moved around, and I came out the other side with a lot of information - some of which I'm still percolating as I go about my training.

We started with a pretty thorough run-down of my collective injuries and how I feel they affect my cycling, then he watched me cycle for a bit. We then talked about my posture, he took some video, measured some angles, watched my technique and made some more very accurate measurements - and along the way he made a observations about my... everything.

It went something like this: My cleats were too far back so my foot wasn't sitting in my shoe properly, and my ankle was too high to pull through on the stroke properly - though this was also partly because of my technique which 'could use some working on'. My saddle was a bit too low, and with my cranks a bit too long, my belly getting in the way and my tendency to sit forward on the saddle because it isn't the right width; meaning that my hips had to lift out of the way to allow my thigh to come up high enough to clear the top of the stroke. This caused me to want to lengthen my back and lift my belly and hips out of the way, so I was lifting up my shoulders to make my back longer. This rotated my shoulders, moved my arms, caused my elbows and wrists to get in strange angles, made it harder to breathe, and put my neck in a funny position. My handlebars were, thankfully, the right width, but the angle on them - rotated forward/back - was a bit off, and they were a bit too high, which had further impact on the way I was using my hips and holding my shoulders.

It turns out that the way the bodys' bits interact is pretty darn complicated.

A lot of the outcome was fine adjustments to my existing setup - cleat position, saddle height, bar height and angles. Just having those things tweaked a tiny bit moved the pedals away and brought the whole front-end of the bike closer to me so it didn't feel as if it was as much of a stretch to get there. He even adjusted the reach on my brake handles so I don't have to go grabbing for them when I am in the drops. Awesome!

There are a few things that have to change though, and it's a good indication of the type of thing that can come out of a bike fit. In theory I'd rather change small things than get a whole new bike, but this could be a fairly expensive set of changes.

So I'm in the market for a new crankset with 170mm cranks to replace the 172.5mm cranks I'm currently using. On the up-side though I'll be dropping my gearing down too, which is more of a recommendation than a requirement, and something that I've been thinking about on and off. As I live in Wellington hills are pretty much unavoidable and with my current weight and level of fitness I can't currently spin up some of the gradients around here with my 36/25 gearing, so when I replace the crank I'll be dropping to a full compact. I might also be dropping the cassette for a 12/27 - currently 11-25 - for the same hilly reasons - not to mention that I've managed to wear out the first two gears in my current cassette because I simply can't go up the hills in anything higher. It seems like this will all work out nicely.

There is also the possibility that I'll need to change the stem from 100mm to 90mm or so. At this stage we're not sure if it will be required though, as first I need to change the saddle.

The saddle needs to go because, basically, it isn't wide enough, and therefore I sit on it funny. I'm not devastated as I've actually not felt comfortable on it for a while anyway, but now I have a clear idea of why it isn't comfortable. Great news is I'll get to try out some of the saddles that The Mechanic at Kiwivelo has been raving about. I'm not going to miss this old saddle - it was a pain in the arse. Ha!

Discussing saddles revealed another thing that amazed me about Anthony. I asked him a lot of questions about replacing the saddle because the darn things are bloody expensive to make too many mistakes on. Replacing gears and cranks is pretty straight-forward - you get a very limited range of options so there is very little thinking to be done. On the other hand - saddles - there are probably 1000's of the damn things out there all with their different advertised forms and features... yet here he was; standing in a garage in Wellington, rattling off which brands were likely to have which sizes, what width-increments some of the major brands had, which brands didn't do different sizes, who had good saddle-try-out systems. I admire a mind that stores that kind of information for immediate regurgitation.

Anthony was so impressed with my physique he requested to see me again in 3-or-so months when he is next in Wellington. I'm pretty sure it's because he needed to remind myself of my prowess as a cyclist, and has nothing at all to do with the fact that I need to change a lot of things about my set-up, lose up to 15kg, get better at riding up hills, have improved core stability, and learn to pedal properly.

The feedback was awesome and I have a slightly better idea now of how I should be holding myself when I ride the bike - how I should be pedalling - and I can do all of this knowing that the bike is set up for me by the same person who is doing the recommendations. It all fits together.

But how does it ride?

So after getting the bike fit done we'd actually planned to take a week off so B could attend and present at a conference in Hamilton. This had originally been a week that my Top Secret Trainer and I had discussed as a no-riding week, but in light of the bike fit, and with my beautiful wife's seemingly endless tolerance for my cycling; we decided to take the bike away so I could do some sweet riding around other parts of the country.

So I got to take my new set-up on holiday, and took a spin through the back-country of the Manawatu, checking out the awesome countryside between Kimbolton, Rangiwahia, and Mangaweka. This is the type of cycling I love - beautiful scenery, being chased by enthusiastic sheepdogs, long winding descents down sheer sandstone cliffs, and rickety one-way bridges that cross crystal clear rivers.

And the whole thing hurt, and the bits that don't hurt feel... strange, and when it all seemed to be working well everything felt... smoother.

It seems the tweaks in my posture have moved the niggles around, or set right imperfections in my pose, so it seems that a lot of the ongoing pain of imperfect posture have been magically turned into the other type of pain - the one that can be handled by mulling over The Rules while sipping a nice warm cup of Harden Up.

I am struggling with changing my technique and I can see that I'll be working on this for a while to come. I have to keep reminding myself to roll my hips forward, or to lower my heels during the bottom of the stroke. It is a flow-on effect that starts when I realise that my shoulders are up around my ears - lower the shoulders, the hips, lower the heels - or when I realise my feet are doing the wrong thing; the reverse happens; lower the heels, reposition the hips, feel the shoulders lower themselves.

I'm not breaking any records, though it is also fair to say that I am probably not breaking myself any more.

Or, at least, not as much as I was.

I'll follow this up with Part 2 when I get my second fit done in three-ish months - then I can do some of that long-term reflection and see what differences I think it has made. Overall, though, I would recommend that you check out getting this done by a professional, and I highly recommend Anthony for the job.

20 Apr 2016 No comments

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