Trip to the physio

After the crippling ride on Sunday I took it very easy. Monday involved nothing except walking slowly and painfully between home, the train station and work. I felt the leg improving throughout the day and was able to ride to my exam the next day, so was thinking the injury might've just been a short term thing that I'd quickly recover from. A pain free run on Wednesday confirmed that..or did it?

After sleeping through my morning run on Thursday, I made up for it by doing 10k in the evening. I felt really fresh and was going much quicker than I usually do (4:30/k). After five km though, my leg started to niggle, and it got steadily worse as the run went on. I iced it and stretched afterwards, but woke up this morning with the familiar pain behind my knee. At that point I realised that it wasn't something that was going to resolve itself and rang a physio (different to the one I went to last year) and booked an appointment for this morning.

I am very impressed with this new guy. Being an ex 2:18 marathoner, he understands running injuries! We spoke at depth about how the injury occured and he tested my leg expertly to come up with the conclusion that I have inflammation of the tendon connecting my hamstring to the knee joint. It definitely makes sense. I initially wound up with the injury after training through incredibly sore/tight hamstrings and right now I can feel that they're under a huge amount of tension.

He told me to start taking NSAIDs (eg. nurofen tablets) and to stay off running completely until my next appointment on Monday. I would've done so anyway, it hurts too much to even consider! Cycling doesn't cause me too much pain though, so I should be right to keep that up and the 'abuse' of the Melbourne to Sydney trip shouldn't set me back too much.

Recovery isn't going to happen by itself apparently. I'm going to have to work on strengthening my hammies.

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In the mean time, I'm going to concentrate on my diet. Weigh in yesterday had me at 65.8kg, which I'm very happy with. Hadn't been too careful, so I was actually expecting to be up.

I've decided that I'm going to start a vegan paleo style diet. Basically I'm just going to eat legumes, vegies and fruit. No grains, no processed food. I see a lot of promise in this diet not because I have any issues with digesting gluten, but just because these kind of foods are very high in fibre and protein while low in calories, so I can retain my gluttonous ways and consume massive amounts of food, feel full, but still lose weight. I'll also be consuming lots of protein, so the spectre of muscle breakdown will hopefully be avoided.

Core strengthening regime is going well. After being very sore at the start of the week when I started back on the pushups and pullups, I'm coping well with my daily regime of 175 pushups, 350 bicycle crunches and 35 pullups. Next week I'll increase that to 200/400/40 and try to maintain that (or at least the pushups and bicycles - might be a bit hard to find a pullup bar:P) during the Melbourne to Sydney ride (I'm going to post a detailed description of the trip on Monday after I've finished my exams).