Saturday, March 21, 2009

Back on my feet!

Last Tuesday, 54 days after my surgery, I took my first steps without crutches. I doubt there will be a bigger milestone than this in my recovery process. Sure, I still look forward to walking without the boot, getting on the bike and ultimately starting to run again, but nothing is as important as the ability to walk. There are some fundamental things that we take for granted and we can only appreciate after spending some time without them. It will take some more time of course to get back to walking normally but at least I now have my hands free and I can carry stuff, which makes a huge difference. My walking abilities are not too bad actually, I was pretty slow the first day I was back on my feet but I'm walking more comfortably now and I'm mostly limited by the clunky boot on my foot. A little over a week and I'll be back in my own shoes. Now onto the past week... I went swimming on 4 days and swam more each time compared to the previous week's sessions. Wednesday was my best day, swimming almost a mile in total and breaking my longest interval record with 1K interval. I swam that 1K in just over 26 minutes, which I'm guessing puts me in the slow jogger category in equivalent running terms but if you consider that I could barely swim 100m-200m without a break when I started I've definitely come a long way. I was hoping to put in a couple more swims like that later in the week but I came back home from work early on Thursday, feeling a bit sick and was still a bit under the weather on Friday so I took 2 days of complete rest. I went back for a swim on Saturday morning but was a bit lazy and only stayed in for half an hour. Still a good week overall, I couldn't expect to be doing much more at this point.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

A good start to the week

Last week was not that great as far as training goes. I only swam Monday and Tuesday and worked out on my fitness ball Wednesday and Thursday. I wouldn't say I was slacking since it was mostly work getting in the way or the pool being way too crowded for me to swim in. I suppose I still did a lot more than what the average person on crutches would do but I like to hold myself to higher standards. I'm trying to make it to the pool on weekdays or get some other kind of workout on days I don't manage to swim. I'm not obsessing much about working out on weekends and I'll gladly skip a workout if I have something else planned. It's not that I'm obsessing much about my training in general at the moment but if on any given day my options are between sitting on the couch at home and going for a swim I feel like I owe it to myself to do the latter. In any case, things got off to a better start this week with a nice 40 minute swim. I didn't have anything planned for the day and since I hadn't swam the last 5 days I figured it was worth driving up to Club O. I had a good session, swimming something over 1K. That's probably really unimpressive but I'm only using my arms, I don't know much about swimming, which means my technique is probably horrible and I can't make a flip turn (I made a couple of unsuccessful attempts, maybe I should try it out some more) so I'm wasting a lot of time each time I get to the end of the pool. I feel at least that my swimming abilities are improving and I'm getting more comfortable in the water. In a few weeks I should be able to start biking so who knows, maybe after all these I could give a triathlon a shot.