I haven't been blogging much... work took over my life for a bit! Before I post my race report from Big Kahuna, I'll back up and talk about my training.
For a couple months, my training was going pretty well. Great, actually. I had a 13 mile training run three weeks ago and I felt strong. Ran it in 2:05, by far the fastest I've done the distance, and it was done pain-free. All those funky muscle imbalances I'd been working through seem to have vanished. I also did the Marin metric century around the same time, and rode with a much stronger rider who pushed me up the hills... we pretty much treated the ride like interval training. Go hard in between aid stations, then chill out and gorge ourselves at each station. It was great.
But I had some pretty tight muscles, and it was time for a long-overdue body work session. My regular therapist, my magic man, decided he was burned out and just vanished, so I made an appointment with the owner of the place. He was great... worked on my uber-tight psoas and quads and hips. He also did some hip flexor stretches.
The next day... uh oh. My legs were worthless. I couldn't walk up the stairs. The next day it was even worse. My chronic issues with piriformis and hamstring started making themselves known. 4 days later I tried my 13 mile run, but by mile 3 I turned around and walked most of the way back to the car. My legs felt like spongy noodles and an old hip flexor pain came back.
Crapola. Just a few weeks out from my race. What to do?? I ended up seeing my neurokinetic therapist. If you're not familiar with NKT, it's freaking magic for anyone with recurring injuries. The theory is that there may be pathways for brain signals that are firing compensatory muscles instead of the right muscles. So the therapy "teaches" your brain to properly fire the intended muscle groups. Last year I went in unable to do a front lunge, and he fixed that in 10 minutes. Sounds crazy but it's really effective.
Long story short, he thinks that I was training with compensatory muscles like my psoas, and when those got released (because they were tight and overworked) my signals got messed up. My quads weren't firing at all, and he got things working again. Then he said, "as your therapist, I strongly urge you to reconsider doing a half Ironman. I don't think your legs are ready for it." To which I said, "sorry, but that's not an option." I've had to bail on my last 3 races due to injury or sickness, and damn it, I was going to do this race!
My training slowly improved, but I'd lost the strength I had previously. I needed to train the "right" muscles that have not been firing properly... and I'm pretty sure there's another component: I remembered that I'd been on prednisone until my last Olympic race. Prednisone is a steroid and a very powerful anti-inflammatory. It's highly likely that I was overtraining and never knew it because of this wonder drug. If it didn't have such nasty side effects I'd go back on in a heartbeat. I just want to be able to train like I was on prednisone all the time!!
So... that brings me to Big Kahuna. Next post...
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