Snow White

     My self-rehab is going well. I believe the root of my injury has finally showed itself. Part of the fun with conducting physical therapy is that the therapist is like a detective. You are often presented with many clues and many different suspects. You have to narrow down which one is the actual culprit and then why it happened. Take for instance, medial knee pain. On the medial side of the knee, there is a meniscus which separates the femur from the tibia. There are also numerous tendons of adductor muscles that attach to the medial side of the tibia. And there is a bursa, which separates all those tendons from the tibia prior to the attachment site. Even once you figure out which one is causing the pain, then you have to narrow down why. Is the muscle tight and pulling on the attachment site causing inflammation? Is the meniscus damaged? If so, why is it damaged? Did they have a fall during a soccer game? Was the fall due to poor muscular strength or endurance causing faulty body mechanics? The list is literally endless.

     As areas of my leg have calmed down, only one culprit remains: the gastroc. More specifically, the lateral head of the gastroc. The gastroc is the main muscle of your calf. The one that bulges out when you point your toes down. There is a lateral head and a medial head. The lateral head attaches to the femur just above the knee joint, underneath the lateral hamstring. Once Shannon massaged that attachment area, my pain went away and has not returned. Further down the lateral gastroc I still have a lot of muscle spasm and tension. Running tends to stress the gastroc more than cycling. I also tend to evert my foot when running, which stresses my lateral muscles more than the medial muscles. Running hills puts even more stress on the gastroc due to the change in running style and angle at the ankle. Rewind back to last year when my problem first appeared and it all makes sense now. I was increasing my running mileage much too fast and also added in hills for the first time ever. My runs went from 3-4 miles to 8-10 miles and included many steep hills on the road and trail. No wonder my gastroc was unhappy. The location of the pain disguised the true culprit. It felt like it was my hamstring, but it was actually deep to the hamstring where the gastroc attachment is. I believe cycling did not aggravate the injury, but also did not let it heal all the way, so when I started running again this year (doing hills again) the problem was reignited. I wish I had figured this all out earlier!

     I have returned to training very slowly and have built up beyond two hour rides now. I knocked off two 2:30 rides last week, one indoors and one outside. I completed a three hour ride today with no problems. Three hours was my goal time to make before moving myself out of my rehab phase and back into more of a traditional base-building period. So far things have been super slow and super easy. When I say slow, I mean slow. Some of my rides have been at 13 mph average speed. So, I have not had any intensity, ridden a hill, or touched the big ring a single time since before Christmas.

     We got a nice little treat last weekend with some snow on Friday night. Shannon and I were watching a movie and did not even realize it was snowing outside. When I looked out the window, the ground was covered and the flakes were still falling. We went outside about 11pm and built a snowman on the dock. The ground was still melting the snow so the wood of the dock was the coldest place and helped our snowman stay around a bit longer. One thing I like about snow is how it reflects light enough that you can see fairly well outside even without a moon. We had fun walking around the pond and building the snowman with no flashlight needed.

     The next morning, I got up and took a few pictures of the snow and our snowman. You have to be quick here in Tennessee. Snow rarely hangs around for more than a few hours. This snow was no exception and it was completely gone before noon. The temperature reached 48 degrees that afternoon and we were able to get in a great road ride in the sunshine.

Snow on the farm

Snowman on the dock

It was a a very moist snow and stuck well to the trees. Snow is usually very dry here in Tennessee when it does come.

Kale surviving under the snow

     I am happy to report that First Endurance is back with me for 2015, joining Maxxis as my sponsors for the season. I cannot speak highly enough about First Endurance. They are committed to quality products and make sure there is never any kind of contamination to their products that might get you flagged on a pee test. I love all their products, but MultiV is now my favorite. I've been on it about a year now and have not been sick one single time since starting it. It is good stuff!

     With the bike down time, I have been working more to save money for racing and other life things. I've been doing all therapy for the past two months. The cookie dough business does not do many deliveries from mid-December through early February due to all the school holidays. I'm saving as much money as I can for the season in case I do finally get myself fully healed and back into race shape, so I can travel and do the bigger races. Hopefully, one of these days, I'll get the attention of a team or sponsor that will help with costs. We are still saving for a house as well. House hunting has been disappointing so far. We have seen two houses that we liked, but both owners wanted way more than the house and land were worth. Both seemed to think they were on a gold mine because they had some acreage. Just because you have land does not mean it is good, usable land. A ravine is not worth the same amount as a piece of flat land. I am interested in another one now that is near my parents and our trail, but I'm not getting my hopes up. I'm expecting another outrageous price tag from what I have seen so far.

     I've been playing with my new drill kit. I built us a firewood rack for the den so now we don't have to go down to the basement every two hours to get wood when we have a fire. My next project is making more ladders like the one I rode in the barrel ride last year. The pond is just screaming for me to jump into it on a bike. I will need a bigger ramp though...

Fire wood rack

     Now comes my first "getting old" moment. I have begun to experience the white hairs. Hey, I'm just 28. Those things aren't supposed to come around for another 15-20 years! I don't know how it started for you (if you even have any white hairs), but here's how it went down for me. One day, I think I see some fuzz in my hair. I try to brush it out, but it doesn't move. Upon closer inspection, I see it is a white hair. Oh well, it's just one. I've heard the old tale about if you pull out a white hair, two grow back in it's place. The little hair didn't look like a head of Hydra, so I plucked it.
   
     A few weeks later, it was back! And it brought friends. I continued to pull them out, hoping nobody would notice, but Shannon is starting to notice them regularly and gets a good chuckle every time she sees one. I bug her about being the old one because she is older than me by a few months. It makes her day to see I'm showing the signs of aging first. The hairs are amassing in numbers now. You know it's getting bad when you try to pluck one and you get a white hair, but it's not the one you were trying to pull out. Doh!