Originally Posted by
Maelochs
it will give you a whole new perspective on how much cycling can hurt, and suddenly the pain of a century won't seem so bad.
Mostly I agree, except that some folks need to go more slowly, some folks don't have time to ride that much ... some folks need a lot more recovery time .... I think we can all increase our capacities, but patience and persistence are as bad as the discomfort.
The thing I would really emphasize would be
My legs ... who knows how far they could carry me? I won't know until i put an equal amount of time into my core and upper body, which went totally slack after almost three months of zero exercise while rebroken bones rehealed.
The worst part is, as my core fatigues I naturally put more weight on arms, which beats my weak shoulders, but I can't support myself properly with my legs with my weak stomach and lower back.
My accident was 08/13, so 9 weeks tomorrow. I’m really happy with how fast every injury has healed. I got off crutches 2 weeks ago, and got rid of my brace this week, per the PT orders the knee ortho wrote. Doing the PT on my own has been easy and frees up the 2 weeknight evenings it would have taken.
I think I never would healed this quickly if I hadn’t been in reasonably good physical shape and been going to the gym 4-5 times a week to do strength and cardio both.
The one thing this accident really drove home is how vital core strength is. I hated doing ab workouts above all, because they were hard for me and usually painful, either during or after. But, with multiple injuries, other parts of my body had to pick up the slack for leg, shoulder and hand that were out of commission. I could really feel how much movement and power my core area had to supply to get around on crutches with no weight at all on my broken leg. I told my trainer that I really understood now what he meant about how important core strength is to everything else.