Today was my first day with my physical therapist Clint. He like my doctor was very impressed with the amount of strength in my quad. He feels that its about 80% although he never saw it before the surgery so it's hard to tell. He hooked me up to an electro stimulator and had me fire my quads when I felt the electro. I was able to do it so hard that I pushed fluid to a suture and almost popped my leg open and sprayed blood and puss all over his wall. It was actually sort of comical. He told me about a friend that actually had that happen to him at his house. Sprayed all over his living room. Also, I have been riding on the trainer and he said for now this is good, just keep it really easy but in 2 weeks or so I should be back pushing pretty good. This is good because the news as far as running is not good.
The legions on my cartilage were about 3-4x the size of the one's he had. We compared pictured and there is a noticeable difference. His was about the size of a dime, mine the size of a matchbox. At this point I will be able to run again. Probably not really big mileage but I will be able to run again. The big question is when. His words to me were "I would just write off running for all of 2012". Not exactly what I wanted to hear. The problem is not that I will have pain but more like I will do damage and the benefits I would get from this procedure would be minimized. He said that I could prove him wrong and that maybe doing some Xterra races or races with shorter runs would be fine but not to expect to train well or much at all for them. So at this point I am not going to worry about much until June and see where I'm at. He has an Alter-G treadmill at his office and he said he'll have me running on that in 6 weeks but probably at about 60% of my body weight. Also, losing some pounds would help too. But I only weigh 168 now and most of that is in my quads. I don't want to lose the strength in my quads so I'm caught in a catch 22.
Cycling and swimming will be large factors to my recovery and how well I recover from this. So pretty much any mountain bike race that has 100 miles, 6 or 12 hours in the title I am going to be signing up for it. I may even get out the road bike and do some crit races who knows. Maybe this is God's way of telling me I really need to work on my bike split. I guess a 4:42 IM bike split isn't good enough.
Don't worry, I'm not gonig to be doing a blog post after every PT session, but we covered so much today and set expections so I wanted to get them out there. I'll keep everyone up to date on the key things.
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