An interesting day today as I had to go to the hospital this morning for my second check-up after the accident. I was highly anticipating being discharged, but unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. It turns out I have to go again in six weeks.
The doctor today, who was different from the one I saw previously, was a bit more pessimistic about everything. He suggested that the possibility of having to re-break the bone is still quite high. He showed me the x-ray, and there is a noticeable misalignment. I’m not entirely sure of the medical terms, but he pointed out the two bones are out by about an inch, which accounts for the large notch on my shoulder.
I have to say, I’m feeling a bit down about all of this. It’s not at all the outcome I was expecting. I’ve been told it could take up to two years for the bones to fully fuse back together, or whatever it is they do. That in itself was unexpected. On the day of the accident I’m sure I was told ~6 months, but then I was pumped up with morphine so who knows?
The whole process took up a couple of hours this morning. I was in and out of the hospital quite quickly, which was good. But with travel, the whole trip took about an hour and 40 minutes. So, most of my morning was gone.
When I got back, I had to do some work, and then I went on the bike during lunch. However, I wasn’t feeling overly enthusiastic today.
Fast Fitness
I opted for one of the fast fitness workouts today provided by MyWhoosh, and this one in particular is called Closedown. It’s 38 minutes long and has a TSS of 42. I looked at the graph and thought it seemed roughly similar to what I had done yesterday, although yesterday’s ride was a free ride and longer.
So, I thought, how difficult could this be?
Even though I did this workout with my FTP set to 215 watts in MyWhoosh, I really struggled with the threshold effort.
About halfway through that block I knew there was no chance I’d be able to complete the next aerobic section. The main difficulty was that I just couldn’t hit the target power.
The numbers on the screen aren’t what I actually have to hit at the pedals—this is something I’ve covered in a previous post. In the end, I had to lower my FTP down to around 185 just to make it through that portion of the workout. To me, that always feels like a complete failure on my part.
Takeaways
The key takeaway from this session is that I’ve still got a lot of work to do to get my fitness back up. I probably should be focusing more on tempo efforts right now. If I follow the numbers suggested by MyWhoosh, the tempo efforts I’m doing are almost like sweet spot efforts because of that 8% difference in power.
Up until a few nights ago I was reading a new book on cycling performance, but I’ve managed to put an S-shaped hairline crack right up the iPad screen, so now I can’t take it with me in the bath. I’ve been quoted £220 for the repair! Madness. The Apple tax. I need to find a way to keep reading as I reckon there is some gold in that book.
So, without knowing more, I think it makes sense to stick around this level for the moment and then maybe look at how to change things up for the more intense workouts in a few weeks’ time.
I’m not entirely sure how to approach that, other than perhaps not using the Neo trainer as the control source.
I think the only way to sum up how I’m feeling today is frustrated.
