Playing about and healing

After the Wee McGregor I was feeling rather spent, very satisfied and really sore. My elbow didn’t like the 22km bumpy descent and was absolute agony after the race. My chest/shoulders/neck (csn) injury, which just keeps persisting, wasn’t much better. My physio ordered me off the bike and I begrudgingly complied. After a few rest days both elbow and csn had settled down to being annoying rather than horribly painful and I felt happy enough with them to head out to the Vulcaniser open day.

The Vulcaniser in North Canterbury is a loop of gorgeous hand sculpted singletrack made up of evilly steep climbs and twisty fun descents. I had entered the Vulcaniser race which was cancelled because of rain so this ride day would let me know what I missed out on. And what I missed out on was pain. I am not fit enough to race that course, and I don’t think I’ll ever be unless I can drop 15 to 20kgs (which I have no plans to do in the near or distant future). It was fun, but I did a lot of pushing up some of the steeper bits. The descents were great and I rode all of them except the one rooty steep bit in the “Boars Nest”. Unfortunately my hubby had mechanical issues which meant only doing one lap, but to be honest it was so cold that I was happy to leave. Now I know that I’m destined to marshal at the Vulcaniser, not race it.

Following that I did some more resting of my injuries, with just some sifty road rides thrown in to keep my fitness from completely disappearing. With the return of my regular physio and his evil fingers of pain and neck/back cracking torture I was soon back in the forest and checking out how the Bottlelake trails are riding after all the logging that has gone on. The loops are all joined up again and most of the track is pretty sweet. There are a few nasty little sandy bits, but all in all it’s looking mint for when night racing starts up again. Unfortunately I learnt that a couple of laps on the singlespeed straight after painful physio treatment makes for feeling pretty crap so that was that for riding for another few days.

Of course I’ve also been playing on my fantastic BMX. I’ve ridden at both North Avon and Hornby tracks and while both are really fun I think I like North Avon’s better. This is unfortunate given it is on the other side of town, while the Hornby track is just up the road. Oh well, I’ll just have to get better at the Hornby track. I’m starting to get a feel for the bike and can do very small manuals. I spent an hour on Easter Monday practising wheelies and lifting my back wheel in the back garden and have improved a tiny amount. My arms are telling me what hard work that was. I’m looking forward to the time in the very distant future when I can roll along the footpath on my back wheel and do bunny hops over the curb.

I took a friend for a ride up Rapaki on Monday, which I thought might be tough given I’d done a couple of hours around the forest on Sunday but I was surprised how well it went. It’s the first time I’ve been up Rapaki since my tour and my legs just ate the hill up. It helped that it was the first time my friend had been up Rapaki and I got to just cruise along, but I was still surprised at the gear I maintained and how fresh I felt at the top. I can’t wait to hammer it up there soon and try and get a new personal best.

In the final bit of news I’m off to Hanmer this weekend to do a 4hr solo race. I’m very excited about it, and not just because of the racing, which I’m aiming to do in a more laid back fashion. Heaps of my great friends are coming up to race and support too so it’s going to be a fantastic weekend away. I’m looking forward to seeing how many laps I can do in my 4 hours without blowing up, but I’m mainly looking forward to hanging out with loads and loads of cool people. Bring on Friday!

Who said I could walk?

After my initial enthusiasm to be back on the bike, the resultant achy sore elbow convinced me that maybe I shouldn’t be getting so excited and riding 3 days in a row just yet. However with my appointment with the surgeons at the hospital on Monday and my physio giving me some weight lifting exercises (no I’m not learning the Clean and Jerk) I decided this morning would be a good morning to commute by bicycle again. It hurt my elbow less and the rest of me slightly less than last time so maybe there’s hope for doing the recreational race at Mt Somers on the 19th of April after all. I’ve sensibly realised that barring an intervention by supernatural powers I just won’t be up to the sport race. 20 fairly flat kilometres should be doable with a month of preparation.

In the meantime I’ve been doing more swimming and my hubby and I headed over to the West Coast for the weekend to do a bit of walking about in the bush. We had fantastic weather and did some lovely walks, and I discovered that the muscles you use for biking are not the same as the ones you use for walking and that my walking muscles didn’t know what hit them. I was hobbling round like an old woman on Saturday night! Luckily a couple of Monteiths sorted me out nicely.

We did a really gorgeous 3 hour return walk up the Pororari River, spotted some birds and stick insects, threw stones in the river, and generally had a lovely time. That night we got eaten alive by sandflies watching the sun set at the beach a couple of minutes walk from the bach we were staying in. Little buggers. It wasn’t until we got back to Christchurch that I felt the full force of their itchy menace.

Being on the Coast was very inspiring and I have a number of poems brewing away in the back of my mind, including one about the fantastic wekas that frequented our accommodation, cheeky sods. Much amusement was had from watching them sneak into the house and chase each other round outside. Silly chickens.

The second day we stopped in Arthurs Pass and did more walking, which once more left me crippled. Ahhhh, the staggering around after another 2 ½ hours of walking, so amusing to my unsympathetic husband. I did enjoy being in the bush though and despite the sandflies I’m really keen to head back over for more exploring. However this might not be such an easy thing to do in the future as I’ve made the big decision to commit to doing the Alpine Epic. I’ve lined myself up a coach, the lovely Andrew from Hub Cycles, my local bike shop. Now I just need to be able to ride for more than 30 minutes without feeling sick or my arm wanting to fall off and I’ll be away. It’s going to be quite a challenge, but I’m looking forward to really seeing how far and hard I can push myself.

PS: I'll put up a few photos from the trip at the weekend

I can ride my bike!

Yes, that’s right. I’ve been for an actual ride, on my actual bike, outside!!! It was a beautiful sunny day today and when I got up there was no resisting the lure of my squishy bike. Also my physio made a very surprising off-hand comment along the lines of why are you not riding your bike yet? Aha!!

Being a very sensible lass, despite evidence in this very blog to the contrary, I decided to ride on the road on my squishy bike and make it a relatively short, easy ride. It has been 69 (tee hee) days since I last rode my bike outside after all. I got off to a wobbly start and one thing was immediately apparent. I need to relearn how to position myself on my bike. My left arm straightens and my right arm doesn’t. This means that initially I actually found myself pulling to the left. I quickly adjusted my left arm to match my gammy right arm. This was good, my new position is actually a much better riding position. The problem is that my left side doesn’t know that yet and so after cruising along for a while I’d find myself all lopsided again. This meant that while my elbow was pretty much fine with the whole ride, my right wrist and shoulder, which were trying and failing to compensate for my bendy arm, were pretty sore.

I know you are all dying to know how much fitness you lose after 69 days of pretty much no exercise. Well, the answer is all of it, and then some. My blog is almost exactly a year old so now would be a good time to recap. My goals were:
1. Lose 10kgs by November 2008
2. Complete the Molesworth Muster in 2008
3. Lose 15kgs in a year
4. Be competitive in the Sherwood Enduro 30km race and the Mt Somers race
Goal number 1: Fail!
Goal number 2: Succeed!
Goal number3: Comprehensively fail
Goal number 4: Ahahahahaha!

I did manage to lose about 6 kgs during 2008 and I am very proud of completing the Muster, but since breaking my elbow all hopes of being competitive, or even competing in races for the next few months has gone out the window. I went for a 14km ride on the road on my squishy mountain bike and it just about killed me. Mainly because I went out and attacked the little rollers like I’ve been riding every day like I used to. I felt very sick after about 7kms and decided that maybe just maybe I’d gone a bit too hard, but also that stopping near a piggery is not a good idea.

So I’m thinking it could be a bit more of a mission than I initially thought to complete the Mt Somers race on the 19th of April. In fact I’ll have to see how commuting goes next week because 14kms on the road isn’t very far. Don’t get me wrong though, I am SO HAPPY to be riding again. Driving to work and back every day has been horrible. I hate driving to work, even in bad weather. I’ve been getting a little bit of a jealousy thing going on when I stop at the lights and 5 or 6 happy carefree cyclists pull up beside me, enjoying the summer sun and the ever present close-call adrenalin. No more car for me now and hopefully in a couple of weeks my arm will be up to the road bike too. So stay tuned for future goals, there might be some biggies!

Rubberbands and Swimming Revisited

It’s all about rehabilitation now. My elbow bends to 130° and straightens to about 3° meaning I can do most day to day things without too much trouble. I can reach the back of my neck finally and can touch my right shoulder with the fingers of my right hand. So good progress there.

Unfortunately my right arm is very very weak still. I can hardly lift anything and all the muscles I built up at the gym in the last nine months have gone. Bugger. To combat this I have been given a big yellow rubber band, woo woo! Yellow is the easiest of rubber bands and I hope to progress to the harder green and blue ones quickly. I’ve found the rubber bands useful for more than just strengthening my feeble arm. They can be deployed in such a fashion that I become a rubber ninja, or as attractive head scarves or even to give the impression of flowing golden locks (well actually none of this accurate, what I really look like when using the bands in these ways is a complete idiot, but hey, we all need a laugh now and then).

Now that I’m finally working on strengthening my arm, the desire to get on my bike for a real ride has been insanely strong. So much so that I’ve actually been for an extremely tentative and short 2km ride for the Bikewise Business Battle. I was safe at all times and had no real problems, other than not really being able to reach the handlebars and not being able to put any weight on my bung arm. So I learnt an important lesson. I’m not ready for the bike. Sigh.

However in the spirit of perseverance I’ve discovered an old favourite fall back exercise, swimming. I really love swimming. I always have. In fact as a child it was impossible to keep me out of water from the moment I could toddle. My poor parents, I was continually throwing myself into puddles, usually face down, and generally being a menace.



As you can see I was at home in the water at 9 months old and by 20 months was an accomplished swimmer. As you can also see from the second photo, we should all be extremely glad that stubbies craze that swept New Zealand in the 70s is over (shudder).



Back to the pool I’ve headed, but lets be honest here, while I love the actual activity of swimming, I very much loath many of its necessary ceremonies, and even more so now that I can actually see. Before this week the last time I went swimming I still had glasses which meant I really couldn’t see properly, which was often a blessing. Why you ask? Well let me list my top ten things that I loath about associated evils of swimming, in no particular order.

1. Full frontal female nudity. I don’t want to see it. Call me a prude, but I don’t. I especially don’t want to see it in my colleagues. And I can definitely live without seeing in from anyone over the age of 60, that’s just too cruel a reminder of what is still to come.
2. Being surprised in the showers by a colleague when naked. As much as I hate seeing my workmates naked, I like them seeing me in my birthday suit even less. It is just wrong. Unfortunately when there’s a pool less than 10 minutes walk from your office and you swim regularly it’s bound to happen. The only way to prevent it is by not showering properly and spending the rest of the day smelling of that delicious chemical chlorine, and/or perform the dance of the wet towel whereby you try to dry and dress yourself without exposing any flesh between your neck and your knees. Of course it is impossible to properly dry yourself in this manner and this in turn makes your struggle to pull your clothes onto your still mostly wet body, while keeping it covered, more than a little ridiculous. After you’ve attempted this fiasco once, and been left feeling like a prudish idiot, you soon come to terms with that fact people are going to see you naked when you get changed and if you just get on with it quickly and don’t make a fuss, generally no one will even notice. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll never be one of those women who confidently stride about the changing room with their towel wrapped around their head (?!), but I have learnt a bit of dignity when dressing and undressing and that means flashing a bit of boob and butt. No one cares after all.
3. Groups of screaming school children. Oh how I hate them. My first day back at the pool and I walked into a maelstrom of screaming. There were school swimming sports on in most of the lanes. But worse than this is when you’re in the shower, just finished drying and suddenly the changing room erupts. One moment peaceful post swim serenity, then next 20 small girls all shouting at each other and a stressed teacher trying to control them. Upon exiting the shower you find your gear has been subsumed beneath the tiny people and you feel like a giant intruding into their hideously loud land of pre-swim excitement.
4. Men in speedoes. When I couldn’t see it didn’t bother me, but now. My precious eyes. Remember kids, speedoes are wrong.
5. Wearing swimming togs in public.
6. The walk of shame. That long, long walk the goes from where you’ve put your gear on a chair, to where you get in the pool. Everyone can see you in your lovely swimsuit, your fetching swimming cap (mmmmm purple rubber), and your extremely flattering googles. You’ve never looked better in your life and you know it. Yeah sure, everyone else has to do it as well, but what are self-confidence issues for if not to point out how hideous this situation is. I find it is best to focus on walking purposefully, as tall as possible, gut sucked in like you’re trying to squeeze through the eye of a needle, and focus on cleaning your googles or checking which is the slow lane. I get to the end of the pool quickly and slip into the water with as much grace as I can muster. Once in the pool all worries evaporate in the flaw-hiding water.
7. Wearing swimming togs in public.
8. Fast people in the slow lane. I’m slow at the moment. Really slow. In fact mostly I have to use the kick board only because my bung arm isn’t up to doing more a couple of laps in a row. I don’t want to be mown down, I also don’t want to be dived on when feel the need to get in the pool like a show off, or kicked in the face when you do a kick turn. Lots of people in the fast and medium lanes? Bad luck, either swim slow in my slow lane or get in a crowded lane with all the other fast people.
9. Wearing swimming togs in public.
10. People trying to talk to me at the pool. When I’m at the pool, I’m in a zone. It’s the zone I use to cope with all the horrors of swimming as detailed above. I’m there to swim. Do Not burst my bubble, I won’t be polite, I’ll possibly ignore you, I may not even notice you. Once I’ve exited the pool, then I can talk to you. Not before.

That’s quite a list of things I hate about swimming isn’t it, but none of these things, or even all of these things combined, can keep me from swimming. Once in the water I fall into a happy trance of going back and forth, up and down the pool. It’s almost as good as being on my bike. Obviously there’s no adrenalin rush, but swimming de-stresses and calms me like nothing else. And as an added bonus my physio says it’s one of the best things I can do for my arm. Yes! So I’ll be back next week. Doing length after length. Getting my arm stronger and stronger so when I see the doc on the 23rd of March there will be no reason for him to say I have to wait to get on my bike.

And now, another poem.

Consequences

The line is hard and straight
Silver & purple
A narrow, raised ridge.
It curves with me
A shallow valley
Shiny
Lumpy

The line tells a tale, but only half.
Of harsh impact
Of rebuilding
Of boundaries crossed

The line hides the steel
Close to (close up) the surface
Deep inside
Use that steel
heal
whole

The line reminds
Adorns
A fine wire fashioned from flesh
from me
for me

The line drives me on.

The Longing

My dear readers (all 3 of you), I am feeling dispirited. I have been to the hospital this morning to see how my bones are healing and while they are healing extremely well it will be 6 MORE WEEKS before I can ride a bike outside. This is terrible news.
Riding on a wind trainer when it is hot is awful and to be honest I really can’t be bothered with it. I get little or no enjoyment from it, more a grim sense of satisfaction that I’ve done my duty. I miss the pleasure of being out in the countryside, up on the hills, in the fresh air and sunshine. I miss hanging out with my mates talking for hours about how great our bikes are, what a great ride that was, I can’t believe I finally nailed that section. I miss shuttling, flowing down the hill, being really scared and excited, pushing my boundaries. I miss cleaning my bike after a long dusty ride. I miss whizzing through trees and doing little hucks. I miss riding with my lovely husband and pushing hard to keep up. I miss the solitude that isn’t lonely cause you’re with your bike and that’s all you need. I miss adrenaline and endorphins. I miss being muddy and dusty and sweaty. I miss the speed.
I miss the intangibles as well. I long to be on my bikes, I feel like I’m missing out. Like I’m that kid that doesn’t get picked to play and watches from the sidelines while everyone else is laughing and having fun. Every day its sunny I know people are out riding their bikes and I’m not. I’ve endured a winter of riding on the road, in the rain, against the wind, in the dark. This summer was meant to be my reward.
I’ve been trying to get my head around 6 more weeks of feeling like this and I just can’t. It Is Not Possible To NOT Ride For Six More Weeks. Unfortunately I don’t know what to do to overcome this. More Calcium tablets (I have been a bit slack in taking them)? More Panadol and more exercises? More wind trainer rides (I don’t know if I can). Right now I’d just like cake, lots and lots of cake. Fortunately I don’t have any cake (or cake like treats) available and I can’t bake to save my life so at least I shouldn’t end up the size of a whale. Well at least not a Blue Whale. Maybe a Minke Whale, or a Narwhal. That’d be cool, kind of like the unicorn of the sea….
Oops I digress. I’ve just checked my calendar and if the doc’s say I can ride on the 23rd of March I’ve still got a good 3 weeks to train for the Mt Somers race. For that to be a realistic goal I really need to get motivated about my bloody trainer again. So how do I do this? I’ve tried TV and I’ve tried training DVD’s. I’ve got a fan set up, but when it’s above 30 it doesn’t seem to help. Gah!
Anyway, thank you all for indulging my self-piteous whine (oh, my favourite shoe shop has also closed so that’s made me really grumpy also). I promise that it will be the last one for a while. I’m off to look at the biscuits in the tearoom.

Small Victories

(now with added flashback!)

Summer is really turning it on this year (as I type this hidden away in the middle of the house). It's currently scorching outside and that combined with a sore arm and difficulties with transport has meant I'm not helping out at the Vulcaniser. I'm pretty disappointed, but it was the right decision.

This week has however been a week of small victories for my arm. I'm spending more time out of the brace than in it, on my surgeon and physio's advice. This has meant I've had some progress. It's funny how something relatively minor can impact on your day to day life so heavily. And yes, a broken elbow is really quite minor in the scheme of things. One of NZ's top female downhillers and all round great chick, Sheryl McLeod, broke her neck around the same time I broke my elbow. She was extremely lucky and is not paralysed and amazingly has a crazy bungee for a spinal cord and is up and walking and back in Dunedin already. She's probably got a year of being off the bike ahead of her, so yes, a broken elbow is minor. Good luck with the rehab Sheryl, show those docs what healing is all about!

My healing is ahead of schedule. My brace was originally going to be off on Monday the 26th of Jan (and was then pushed back to mid-Feb by a doc I'd never seen before), so getting it off on Thursday was good news. Now I'm developing a list of things that last month were mundane, or not even worth noticing, that are now great achievements and reasons for celebration.

These all apply to my right hand/arm (of course):

• Licking my fingers - especially after crumbling feta, mmmm salty goodness.
• Scratching my nose
• Putting sunglasses on
• Touching the back of my head
• Putting moisturiser on my forehead (still can't do it on the rest of my face without poking myself)
• Doing up my bra
• Washing my left shoulder and armpit!
• Washing my hair
• Sleeping next to my husband without covering him in bruises from being whacked with a hunk of metal

All in all, I'm pretty happy with progress, even if it is coming at the price of increased pain. This rehab is going extremely well. And I do know a bit about rehabbing joint injuries. (Cue wavey, misty fade to flashback.......)

Picture, if you can, 14 year old Tink, riding her silver ten speed home from school. No helmet, because this was back in the day, and in one hand a delicious cola flavoured popsicle. Yes, riding with one hand was silly, but two hands on the bars would not have in any way prevented or mitigated what happened next. Chatting to my friend and happily whizzing along, from behind us came a couple of third form boys, damn turds. One of them was either showing off, or just a complete shithead (I know which side I come down on) and decides to give the girls a fright by cutting in in front of us at high speed. Ahahahahahahaa ,not. This young man (whose name I won't put up here), misjudges his turn, rides into my front wheel and the next thing I'm lying on the road screaming and looking at the bits of gravel that are inside my popsicle. This is the least of my worries as my right leg has completely given out and I can't get off the road. Loads of people are standing around and my friend has run back to the shop to get them to ring my mum (yay small towns, everyone knows everyone). Then a different third form boy (who's name I also won't put here and who probably doesn't even remember this, but who I'm still extremely grateful to) picks my up off the road and lays me out on the grass. After that everything is a blur, but the result is a severely torn ACL (Anterior Cruciate Ligament) in my right knee and months and months of physio.
At the time I was playing competitive squash and was just beginning to travel round the South Island to play in tournaments and I wasn't giving it up because some little shit was being a smart-arse. That was until one Sunday evening when I was running to the back of the squash court to get a long shot and there was an extremely audible bang. Yep the ligament completely snapped. And once it had life was actually a lot more simple in some respects. I couldn't play squash at all anymore, my knee would completely dislocate with the twisting. So for the next 3 years I played volleyball and wore a brace and when my knee occasionally popped out, I'd pop it back in. When it got really bad I'd see my fantastic physio, but otherwise it was all good. Then in seventh form I had the ACL reconstruction done (and a huge amount of cartilage removed). If any of you know how modern ACL operations go, forget about that. I was on the table for a little over 8 hours, and woke up in an ankle to hip splint which stayed on for a month. When I got it off my leg was completely wasted to the bone and hurt more than anything I have ever experienced since (include this silly elbow mishap). I was then in a ROM brace for another 3 months (throughout the coldest Central Otago winter for a long time, brrrrrrrr) and had physio everyday initially, then every second day after a month. I had to relearn to walk. Now I believe the operation takes a couple of hours and you are up and walking around the same day. Ahhhhh progress, if only I'd had it back then. (Cue wavey, misty fade to present........)

Having been through that with my knee I have to say that this elbow thing is a bit of a walk in the park. Of course the one thing that makes the current situation worse than back then is that now I am obsessed with my bikes and am suffering terrible withdrawal symptoms from not being able to get outside and ride. Back then I was self obsessed and worried about boys (being a teenage girl), so a bit of extra angst wasn't really a big deal. So with that in mind the bending and straightening continue and if I seem a little grumpy (read: a complete bitch most of the time), its just because I haven't had my fix in a while.

Bionic Woman

Better, stronger, faster. Well I’m none of those things at the moment, but I do seem to be healing pretty well. Last week I was back at work doing half days, which was pretty tiring, but I did manage a couple more rides on my trainer. I also had a couple of doctor’s appointments and finally found some information out about how long I’ll be in my robo-arm and what sort of stuff I can be doing. The best bit was I got to see my metalwork, I have lots of stuff in my elbow. More importantly I got a referral to physio (more on that later).

My lovely man has splashed out and bought me a new computer for my roadie which measures cadence (RPM) and brought me home some intense training dvds for me to play with while I’m stuck riding inside (thanks Paul). Unfortunately I’m not really up to putting in a proper training effort and can only handle the warm up session before I’m exhausted and needing a lie down. Feeling like a nana isn’t the best, but at least I can do something. Still it gives me some good goals to work towards so I’m enjoying it.
Further excitement occurred at the weekend when I got out of the house!! Shock horror. We drove out to Omihi in North Canterbury and helped get the Vulcaniser course ready for the race this weekend. I was intrigued to see how I would handle walking up and down hills for a few hours and amazingly I handled it pretty well and only had to rest a couple of times on the return journey. On top of that encouraging progress I discovered I’ve really got a knack for sticking pig-tails in the ground. Such a useful skill.

It was fantastic to get out and do something bike related with a really wonderful group of people, even if it did make me a little sad that I couldn’t have a ride on the fantastic track myself. After all that fresh air (and gale force winds) I was pleasantly tired out and finally had a decent nights sleep. Yay.

This morning I had a physio appointment at the hospital, just what I’ve been waiting for. It went fantastically and the news from the physio was all good. My range of movement improved massively while I was there and although it hurt like hell I was grinning the whole time. It turns out the information I got from the doctor last week was also wrong. So now I have to take my brace off at least 3 times a day and practice straightening and bending my arm, I have to take it off in the shower, I have to take it off if I’m just watching TV. Yeah baby, I am so happy about that. My mood was further improved with the news that I should be able to be out on my bike in about 6 weeks. Hmmmmm, maybe Mt Somers is a realistic goal after all. So all in all, things are progressing extremely well and I’ll be back riding to work in no time. Driving really does suck a lot.