Sorry for the extended delay in updating the blog--super busy times as I'll get into below. First-off, here is a summary of my volume totals for the first 6-months after my Total Knee Replacement:
Swim
As you can see, my swim totals are not that impressive so far. Comparatively, during the first 5 months of 2022, I swam 219k yards compared to just 88k yards this year. In other words, I've only swam about 40% of last year's volume so far this year.
This is really not that related to the TNK. Obviously, December was, as I still had the open wound and so had to stay out of the pool. However, since then I've had the green light and my limited kicking means the TKR really has not been a barrier to my swimming. What has happened is a series of life commitments as well as admittedly, less motivation to swim with no clear multi-sport plans laid out. From the life commitment perspective, I've already attended 4 weddings (out of 9 this year) and two of those were in Mexico (including my youngest daughter's wedding) that involved 5-day trips. I've also driven to Kansas and back twice and once to Cleveland to help my other daughter with her residency driven relocation. Also, we went to London for 5-days to support Alex/Rachel in the London Marathon.
I started to ramp up in May but then we moved our primary residence to the NJ shore and this necessitates open water swimming but for the first couple of weeks the water temp was below 60 degrees and my usual NJ swim crew was not yet back in town and this didn't help my motivation. I started June off strong but then we got hit with the Canadian wildfire smoke so that was another 3-day set-back.
Lot's of excuses I know, but I'm now starting to get wet more regularly and expect to do at least 100k yards for June-August and frankly will try to do more than that.
As a consequence, I'm swimming about 15 sec/100 slower right now than last year (1:55 vs. 1:40)....
Bike
It was quite challenging/painful for me to ride my bike much for the first ten weeks or so. My knee just didn't have the range of motion. I found it was a little easier on a recumbent bike but I wasn't able to really get going until the later part of February. My volume since then looks pretty solid but its really not, compared to my historical standards--for example, last January I rode over 1,700 miles in just that one month (more than April/May combined this year). The net of this is I rode 3,123 miles in the first 5 months vs 6,569 last year, which about 48% of last year's volume--not really what I'm looking for.
Early on, as I mentioned my TKR really held me back and while its noticeably better now, I still find when I push up above about 200 miles/week, my knee(s) start to get achey. Some of this is probably related to the TKR but I think some of it is a function of the detraining that may body went through post surgery and the difficulty one has, when you are 65-years old, when you ramp up again.
I'm at the shore now and able to ride more consistently outside so I expect my volume to climb up above 1,000 miles/month. I've also began to ride a bit longer (although I still haven't gone further than 50 miles in one ride) and I'm starting to add more intensity intervals/higher spinning rpms on my Zwift trainer and hope to begin to see my bike fitness begin to shape up. I'd say at this point I'm down about 30 watts relative to last year, which is pretty substantial.
Run/Walk
Almost all of the volume to date has been walking although I ran for the first time on the beach in Mexico for about 400 yards in early May and then I ran 1/2-mile in 5:30 in the 3rd week of May. I finally, on a bit of a whim, decided to enter the Stone Harbor Turtle Trot 5k run over Memorial Weekend and see what happened. Low and behold I was able to run the whole thing--although quite slow!
You can see I managed to average 10:54/mile and I even negative split the run. It frankly felt normal and like I didn't have nearly as much of the limp that characterized my run pre-surgery over the last few years.
This is encouraging and I've started to run 2-3 miles 2-3 times week (which is about the most I plan to do--at least for now) and my knee seems to tolerate it reasonably well so far.
Physical Training
You can see that I peaked out in March with 20 hours of dedicated PT. I'm still doing this fairly regularly but I suspect that will be down around 10 hours/month or less going forward.
Looking Ahead
I think I'm going to try to do 2-4 super-sprint/sprint triathlons this year including the Stone Harbor Sprint on 7/9 with Anders when he comes out and visit. I'm also planning on doing several open water swim events and in fact have a 1.2-mile OWS on that same day in July!
I'm also planning to do, in October, a solo through-hike of the Shenandoah NP AT section, which would be about 105-miles over 6-7 days.
I'm hopeful that these events will help with training motivation and that I can begin two ramp up my post-surgery fitness some because while I've recovered well from the surgery, and the knee pain is by-in-large gone at this point, I'm not in very good endurance shape and I suspect my races will clearly show that...
Time to work harder!
Onward and upward!
