post-injury progress

It's been three and a half months since my crash in June, and while I continue to progress, it's been a lot slower than I originally expected. Strength is improving thanks to Physical Therapy (@ Potrero Physical Therapy, supplemented by plenty of work in the gym), and my cycling is getting stronger after a break for some travel and watching America's Cup. My Strava plot tells the story (distance in km):

Note the short distances from late 2012 were from a focus on running versus cycling.

I can run short distances (very short) but even a half mile running to the gym last week left me slightly hobbled for a few days. I'm definitely looking forward to getting my running legs back, as I very much miss trail running.

Cycling is going better. While my right side is uncomfortable pedaling, it's not painful, and I'm more limited by lack of aerobic fitness and endurance than the injury. I've not yet done any extended climbs (more than 1100 vertical feet), and my longest ride was commuting to work this morning, 53 miles.

It's been frustrating, for sure. But the high degree of fatigue I suffered earlier is almost completely gone now. I continue to be mostly off caffeine for the first time since college, which is nice (I had some white tea when traveling to the East Coast due to jetlag). But for timeline I'm definitely thinking early next year before I'm going to set any meaningful fitness goals. For now the focus is on the physical therapy and on getting a minimal level of aerobic work in.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marin Avenue (Berkeley)

Image
On Saturday, I got an email from Tim telling letting me know that Murphy's Spring Classics was going to start up Marin Ave. I'd missed that. Murphy announces his courses the day before, and indeed it was already well into the night before when the course announcement went out. I'd skipped over the details, jumping straight to middle and end games. Marin? I laughed at the irony, because not long before when he'd told me he was choosing to repeat the Nifty Twn Fifty which we'd done together last year versus selecting Murphy Mack's Stage Mullett two-day, I responded I didn't think I had it in me to ride Marin Ave two years in succession. Well, so much for that. I was committed, so I went downstairs to swap my 11-26 cassette for my Recon 12-27. The name is easily overlooked: "Marin Ave" fails to strike the same impression as, for example, "Redwood Gulch" or "China Grade". But among those in the know, Marin Ave is infamous i
Read more

hummingbird feeder physics

Image
I couldn't figure out how the hummingbird feeder worked. Why didn't it overflow? Forces need to balance, of course. Neglecting surface tension, there liquid level is higher in the inner reservoir than in the feeding chamber, so there must be a corresponding pressure difference. Suppose the pressure in the inner chamber were zero. Then the column height difference would need to be atmospheric pressure / (density of liquid × gravity). But this is over 9 meters! Obviously the height difference is only approximately 1% of this. So the pressure difference inside versus outside is only approximately 1%. The inside is only slightly below atmosphere. So air is getting in. How? Does it diffuse through the liquid? If this were the dominant mechanism, it wouldn't take long for the pressure inside to go from 99% to 99.3%, for example, which should be plenty to push the column of liquid down in the inside chamber and thus push liquid out through the holes. It would over
Read more

Gallium Pro geometry

Image
On Caltrain yesterday, I was surprised to see among the usual set of commuting bikes a SRAM Red-equipped Argon Gallium Pro. The bike immediately stole your attention. The design was one which has been trending: clear-coated carbon with plenty of text detail so the viewer is sure to realize he's gazing upon the result of advanced, proprietary engineering and not at yet another paint job on the same old OEM frames being pumped out of the same old Taiwanese factories. But it worked: the bottom bracket area was huge, the downtube a large-diameter "inverted Kamm tail" design seemingly designed to maximize wind resistance, the top tube a broad, eccentric shape which screamed "vertically compliant yet torsionally stiff". All it lacked were the pencil-think seat stays Cervelo popularized, but this was a machine designed for stiffness over anything else. It seemed dramatic overkill, since the bike was small (the Argon "XS" I suspect). There wasn't muc
Read more