Knee Surgery

A couple of months I got kicked in the back of the knee during a soccer game. It was extremely painful, but we didn’t have any subs so after limping around for a few minutes I told myself to pull myself together and keep playing.

Over the weekend I went for a couple of runs but ended up cutting them both short and walking as the back of my knee was aching. A black bruise the size of a softball had formed. Time passed and the bruise faded by in it’s place a large puffy bump grew. I had the bump drained once and, to my dismay, a harder bump that remained in it’s spot. It must be swelling, I hoped.

I gave it another three weeks before conceded that the swelling was not going down. “Is there a bump still here?” I asked most anyone who I thought that it wouldn’t gross out. “Yeah, that’s gross,” they would reply consistently.

I went back to see Dr. Dolbeare at Boulder Orthopedics, hoping he would drain it again and I would be on my way. As I sat on the examining table, he said, “I don’t think draining it is going to help. I can try draining it, I can leave it alone, or we can operate.”

I decided I didn’t want to get stabbed again in the knee for no reason, and I didn’t want to leave scar tissue in my knee so surgery was the only option. I made an appointment.

Today, I kept that appointment. I took the bus to the Boulder Surgery Center this morning after picking up some pain medication for later. I checked in, put my bag in a locker and met a lovely woman who’s name I can’t remember who cleaned my knee and put in my IV. She had done the Boulder Half Ironman twice and had also completed three Ironman Triathlons. We had plenty to chat about. I was sorry to see her head out to lunch and leave me to read my book while I waited for someone to come in and knock me out.

The anesthesiologist came in to walk me through what was going to happen. Then, I had a pre-med student visit to as permission to watch my procedure. Finally, Dr. Dolbeare came in to initial my knee. They all seemed concerned they were going to operate on the wrong knee.

Finally, my nurse came in to go over everything one last time. She also slipped some valium into my IV to help me to relax before the rolled me down to the ER. They laid me back and wheeled me into the elevator to take me down to the ER where everyone else was already waiting. They had me scoot from one table to another and I hear myself asking, “This is the ER? Do we have to move again?”

I woke up in the recovery room where I dozed in and out while a recovery nurse took my blood pressure repeatedly. I asked for two apple juices and 3 glasses of water. Jason came to pick me up and take me home. I hobbled out of the hospital holding the hand of the nurse and Jason. I got home and laid down on the couch where I turned on the Food Network and dozed most of the afternoon.

Dr. Dolbeare called tonight, told me that the scare tissue they removed as 4 centimeters by 2 centimeters. He said it was huge. He made me promise, again, that I wouldn’t work out for 48 hours and that I could take off the bandages after three days.

Currently, I’m in very little pain. My leg is still mostly numb. I’m not looking forward to numbing agent wearing off, but as for right now, it’s Netflix and dozing. I can post a picture, would that be gross? Lindsay Brust

Losing My Swimming Training Wheels

I woke up this morning at about 7am. My motivation hit the snooze button so I hauled myself to a masters swim class so someone else could talk me into doing “just a few more laps.”

We started with a warm up of swimming, kicking, then pulling before getting into a few drills and strength training exercises. One exercise I found really interesting was swimming the length of the pool (50 meters) with your eyes closed. The purpose of the exercise is to help you get the feel for the water. You are suppose to concentrate on feeling the pressure of the water over your whole arm, not just in your hands.

I ran into the rope that separates the lanes after about 5 strokes. I made a note to myself to practice sighting so that I don’t get entirely off course in the triathlon. I think it did help though.

I’ve also started to use the pull buoy for most of my swims – especially the long ones. The purpose of the pull buoy is to lift your hips and legs so that you don’t have to kick to keep your body floating. It allows you to focus on the first quadrant of your body where the power should be when you are swimming.

To use it a pull buoy, you place it high between your thighs and keep your legs still when you are swimming. This has pros and cons.

Pro: I get out of the pool after most of my swims with my triceps completely fried.

Con: I’m not used to kicking.

Pro: When I use the pull buoy, I can breath every three strokes or even less.

Con: When you finally steal the pull buoy away from me, and I will fight you for it, I have to breathe every two strokes, I feel less balanced in the water and I panic more easily if someone kicks water in my face when I try to inhale.

Today, I attempted to use the buoy less. I’ll miss my training wheels, but I think, 6 weeks out from the half Ironman, it’s time to phase out my little blue friend. Lindsay Brust

Challenges with High Volume Training: Life.

I haven’t blogged for a while. The reason for this is my sense of humor took a temporary hiatus from triathlon training. I’ve reached the highest volume of hours / distance in the training program and I’m extremely frustrated that I haven’t been meeting my goals I set for myself each week. The rest of my life has this pesky way of distracting me from getting in the necessary time in the pool, on my bike and out running I think I need to stay on track.

I’ve also started getting lonely and kind of restless. Most of my training has been by myself partly because I need to fit in workouts at odd hours of the day and partly because I hesitate to ask my friends if they would like to join me in my 5:30am spinning class (I don’t care for getting laughed at). When I’m doing brick workouts over the weekend it’s difficult to time the transitions so that people can join me for just one leg. I’ve also had to miss happy hours, gigs my friend’s band played, and weekend camping trips due to long hours training on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

In addition to all this, I just found out yesterday that I need knee surgery. My gross little lump in my knee has turned into scar tissue and will need to be removed surgically. Simply draining my knee again won’t work as it’s not liquid anymore. Fortunately, my doctor said that the procedure  is minimally invasive, he can put the stitches under my skin (really?!), and dress the incision so I should be able to start training 48 hours later. This is amazing, but I don’t feel like I have 48 hours to lay on a couch recovering from knee surgery.

My body composition quest is progressing acceptably. I’m currently at 23% (down from 24%). I usually get stuck at 23% so I’m going to have to be good for a little while to see if I can break through this plateau.

All that said, I am starting to feel better, the weather is finally getting (and staying) pretty nice outside and I’ve broken through some stuff going on in my personal life to a place where I am ready to redirect my efforts back to training. Hopefully that means blogging too. Hope you are all doing well in your training, you life, or wherever your focus might be. Lindsay Brust

Body Composition and Triathlon

One of the tricks I use to meet goals is to commit to them publicly. I meet with a friend on a quarterly basis to chat about has been working during the past three months, what didn’t work for us and what we want to accomplish in the coming quarter. Admitting these goals to someone keeps me on track with the parts of my life I want to be moving forward with. I started a blog and raised money for the American Heart Association to motivate me while I was training for my first marathon and I started this blog to publicly proclaim my attempt at completing a half Ironman.

So here I am, using this blog as a forum with which to publicly commit to decreasing my body fat percentage from 24% to 18% by the half Ironman on August 7. Here’s why:

Success in triathlon is all about generating the most power in the most efficient and economic way possible (I’m also looking into sneaking a motor onto my bike somehow). In other words, a triathlete wants to increase their power-to-weight ratio. Your power-to-weight ratio is simply the amount of power you can create divided by your body weight. In the most general of terms, the stronger and lighter you are, the better.

This is also an important ratio because it will keep you focused on the right numbers on the scale. Instead of just trying to lose weight, an athlete needs to focus on body composition – losing fat while maintaining your lean muscle mass.

Here’s some interesting facts:

• Some research has shown that a runner can gain 1% in running speed for every 1% reduction in body fat.
•  Male triathletes tend to have 4-12% body fat, and female triathletes 8-17%.
• Here is how the American Council on Exercise (ACE) breaks down body fat percentage categories:

I’ll keep you up to date on my efforts on changing my body composition and if you happen to see me eating a Snickers bar, please grab it and run. At least I will get some exercise chasing you. Lindsay Brust

Freestyle Hand Entry

After my fantastic bike ride on the Boulder half Ironman bike course yesterday morning, I met the equally (if not more) fantastic Mary Miller for a stoke analysis and swimming lesson at the Colorado Athletic Club. If you don’t know Mary, you are missing out. Not only is she a fabulous athlete but she’s also a really cool person. Mary had good news for me. I’m probably going to survive the swim. She seemed pleasantly surprised by my stroke, though I have to admit, I do set people up to assume the worst when it comes to my swimming ability.

We “warmed up” by doing a couple of laps sharing a lane. This alone was an extremely eye opening experience. The first thing I noticed was how much water she moves while swimming. I was approaching the wall at the same time she was leaving it during one lap and I think the force of her push and first couple of strokes after that almost pushed me into the next lane. I realized how different her mental approach to swimming must be compared to my approach of “conserve energy and survive.”

Her main piece of advice was that I be much more aggressive with my hand entry. I had been allowing gravity to drop my arm from a recovery position into the water then down so that my body went up and I could breathe. I thought that this must conserve energy when really, it probably just caused me to bob up and down a lot, making me pretty inefficient.

Mary suggested that a more aggressive hand entry would give me forward motion and set up my pull to be much more powerful. It would also cause my shoulders to rotate more naturally and allow me to breathe without turning my head as far.

Here’s how to do it:

1. During recovery, be sure to keep your elbows high
2. Think about leading the entry into the water with your thumbs (slightly, don’t over exaggerate this) about the height of your goggles or swim cap
3. Push your hand and arm forward in an aggressive motion about 2 inches under the surface of the water
4. If you do it right, this aggressive motion will turn your body onto the side so your tummy and back faces the sides of the pool (I had been trying to get this turn to come from my hips with very limited success)
5. If you move your upper body with this kind of purpose your legs will, almost automatically, do what they need to in order to stabilize your motion so you don’t need to think about them anymore

She suggested I do 5 sets of 100 meters thinking about that – about 10 laps – resting for about 10 seconds every two laps. While it sounded counter intuitive to me at first, this also regulated my breathing and allowed me to go much further without needing to stop and gasp for breath as much. Thanks Mary.

Lindsay Brust

Boulder Half Ironman Bike Course

This morning I attempted the Boulder Half Ironman bike course for the first time. I thought it might be a good idea to see what I was getting myself into on August 7 when I will have to ride the course, not once, but twice after swimming over a mile. Then I will have to run a half marathon. Here’s what the course looks like from my house:

You can see a more detailed route on MapMyRide as well as the course elevation:

Kind of rolling, not too bad… until you get to that last part. That long slow ascent is deceiving on a bike. It’s not quite steep enough that you would notice it, but it’s frustrating because the whole time I’m wondering why I feel like I’m working so hard and not going any faster.

This morning was absolutely gorgeous, and not just because today is officially the first morning that I passed more people on a bike than bikers passed me. I unintentionally timed my ride during the Boulder Sprint Triathlon and joined their route for a little while about the time that the slowest swimmers and riders were just starting out. I’m sure I looked fresh by comparison as I hadn’t woken up at 4am for an early morning swim in the Boulder Reservoir. I felt like a rolling cheerleader, passing people, shouting encouragement. It was awesome.

Views like this don’t hurt either:

This is the turn from Highway 36 onto St. Vrain. See how it goes downhill? That makes me happy.

I also stopped on 75th just south of St. Vrain to snap a photo of Long’s Peak, who made a snowy appearance on my ride:

Almost everyday, I think to myself how lucky I am to live in Boulder. Lindsay Brust