Total Knee Replacement--What the first 4 months look like from a volume perspective

 OK, my TKR surgery was 11/30, so Dec-Mar represented my first 4 months of recovery/rebuild.  Here is what that aggregate volume stats look like:

Here is a description of what's been going on:

Swim

After the surgery there is a period of time where you have an open wound and can't swim--basically I had to wait for a while after I had my staples out.  This then bumped into the holidays so I decided to start swimming in January.  For my start-up swim month I ease into it and swim just 2-4 times/week and relatively short.

February brought a whole host of travel and other commitments, so I decided to back away from much swimming and focus on the other aspects of my recovery.  In the last 3 weeks of March I've begun to ramp again and hope to jump up to near 30,000 yards in April--from there I can return to my normal swimming volumes (40,000+).  today, I swam for the 8th time in the last 9 days.

Bike

The bike is my main thing.  I've tried to push it along as quickly as I could but was definitely limiteds by pain/mobility over the first 2-3 months.  Finally in March, I began to return to quasi-normal bike-wise and you can see that I'm approaching 1000+ miles/month.  I would expect to be above 1,000 miles/month going forward and I will also begin to start building both intensity and the length of my longer rides.

Walk/Run

All walk so far.  I got a little carried away in December but my docs shut me down and I've been slowly rebuilding.  I still have trouble walking much beyond 5 miles so this is my area of biggest disappointment so far.  I just took a whole week off to settle my knee down a bit.  I definitely want to build this number and begin to push up more towards 10 miles at a time.  I'd like to be able to do full on legit hiking/climbing down in Shenandoah by May and maybe even run a bit (not much).

PT

My docs were mostly against this at the outset but you can see that I'm spending significant time on it now.  I expect to do so for another month or two and then hop[e to back off from the time I'm investing there.

Total Time

For the first time since the surgery, I feel like I was beginning to be a real athlete again in March.  Almost 100 hours!  Pretty low intensity, but beginning to get there!

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Here is what the last few weeks look like: