SBR Utopia ~~~~ Permanently OPEN!! (Page 113)

Matt, read that on Strava about your Achilles - that is a complete bummer. I have been working with the same coach for 5 years now, and have been really injured twice during that time: bike crash/separated shoulder and trail run tumble/pinched meniscus. During both recoveries I found having a coach to be invaluable. But he knew me well and also had direct interface with my Doc and PT, so all. Together they worked through a coordinated plan to get me rehabbed and well again. The meniscus injury was probably the most similar to your yours in that I couldn't run at all and my coach was very creative in getting me to do all the things I needed to do and holding me accountable to doing them - that is something a PT nor Doc can really do. He also kept me convinced that if I just trusted and stuck to the process everything would work out. He really kept my rehab the number one priority and I know I would have just gotten frustrated on my own. Through alll the work he had me do I was able to run every step of my IM marathon with hardly any real running all summer - could never have done that on my own. Now all that said, I don't know if I would GET a coach to help me work through injury; it really helped me to already have a good working relationship with mine, and I think the same for him. He understood exactly what he could expect from me and how to manage me well. Do you have someone in mind that you already know somewhat or has that kind of experience? Not sure if Shane is reading the thread since it got archived, but he could probably offer some great advice at least on how to interview and qualify a coach that could help you out. Everybody is different in their needs, but the number one thing I get out of my coach is accountability to not only do the things I am supposed to do, but to actually do them right so that I am prepared to do the next thing right. And that leads to consistency, and, well, we all know what that leads to.

I am no help on the injury front but a couple things I noticed from working with a coach this past year.

1.   Really focusing on my weaknesses.  I always had trouble letting go of my strength (run) and focusing big time on my swim and bike.  I busted through big plateaus in both as a result
2.  Not peaking too soon.  When I had 'A' races late in the year I would always struggle.  I would put a lot of physical and mental strain into the winter and early summer months and burned out by late summer.  This was corrected and would be tough for me to find that balance without a coach.
3. Change in workout and volume stimulus.  When I was self coached I would tend to put the same workouts and durations and fall back into my comfort zone workouts when in doubt.  The comfort zone was not actually EZ but just the same stimulus.  A coach had me doing some completely different workouts and amazing how hard a steady 4 hour high Z2 ride can feel just turning the pedals.

I had the same doubts you are experiencing which is why I took the plunge.  It would be hard for me to go back on my own now.

Hey thanks James - according to the doc this is one of those things that can be extremely stubborn, but it seems to be going in the right direction. Following is TMI:

The issue at the moment is with the point of connection where my Pronator Teres muscle connects with my elbow. This muscle is used mainly to pronate the forearm (if you hold your arm straight out this would rotate your thumb down, not up). It is a grip and rotate injury that is most common to golfers. It flared up during a bout of unstructured training due to a lot of travel where I was gripping and heaving around luggage in and out of trunks of cars and overhead bins every day. Without any resistance, the Pronator Teres really doesn't do anything when you flex the elbow, but it does get recruited when bending the elbow under resistance. So what I notice with swimming is that a correct high elbow catch can aggravate it, while an incorrect deeper, more straight arm catch is ok. So, what I have been instructed to do is to dive my hand somewhat deeper than I normally would and pull with a more straight arm for now while we are working through it. I have to be careful to dive my hands a little deeper on entry rather than entering shallow and then simply pressing it down, which tends to lift the trunk of the body up while pressing the legs down, causing some slight porpoising. I am also supposed to do this with both arms so as to not introduce any extra freakiness into my stroke. This works the shoulders more instead of the lats, so to avoid any trouble there none of my efforts are harder than T-pace, even on the shorter stuff. So that just means I move down a lane or two at masters and make new friends! All that is an example of the kind of instruction I get from my coach (in addition to checking in and making sure I am doing my PT), who has worked through the issues with my Doctor and developed a plan to keep me going while I am rehabbing this dumb little thing.

Edited to add: Oh, and at the moment paddles are a definite no-no, so when we have a pull set I just use a buoy by itself.

That is very cool stuff Marc. I know my coach incorporates WKO somehow to help in predicting workout metrics, do you know if WKO can do similar? From my end I like it as it means we hardly ever test; instead assigned efforts are predicted and adjusted by his experience coupled with analysis of previous workouts.

Exactly the same here Marc, every last bit of it! I always think of the advent of my achilles issues as the marker between my young self and old self: when they first came on at 40 years old I thought I was done running for good. After a year of internet doctoring it and trying to manage it myself I finally went to a sports doctor and he immediately prescribed a round of PT, Deep Tissue Massage, and ART. After 5 weeks of very aggressive treatment, I was pain free and running again. I became a believer and felt like a complete idiot for not jumping on it sooner as a singular priority and thus losing an entire year of training. Since then I have learned that I can no longer train like I did when I was in my 20s and 30s, which actually means that I train a lot smarter now than I used to. And while I am probably WAY over-zealous about it, I skip the internet diagnosis completely and instead immediately head for the doc on the occasion I feel something coming on.

Hey Ryan - good comments all around. I haven't thought about too much, but you are right in pointing out the balance a coach can bring if you are like me (and it sounds maybe like you?) and can't manage it on our own. Being able and interested in training and racing all 12 months of the year is great - left to my own devices I would always be smoked by early August and then shut down until February or March, and then have a HUGE hole to dig out of. I hate thinking back on how many years I did that.

Yup James - that is what I do as well. Free and Back strokes are ok. One arm butterfly is ok; breast stroke is completely out. That is a bummer as most of my swimming currently is at masters, and it stinks to not be able to do all the strokes.

For masters, if everyone else is doing breaststroke, grab a kickboard and just do the kick.  You'll keep up reasonably well.

You obviously have never seen my kick! 

FTFY

2015 is upon us folks...and with that, the new thread is in the staging area.

SBR U

I liked Marc's idea of just cutting it down to the U.  

I've been lapped when trying to do breast stroke kicking. yes, they had to come around on the left.

Damn... I've only got 9 days of running left until I fall apart?

Enjoy it while you can.

LOL. Well, Ok, snickered a little. but it was out loud.

Breaststroke kicking was the only time I could keep up with the kids in a kick set!

NEW THREAD! NEW THREAD!

How are we EVER going to catch up with the Mantees if we keep this one open????

I've got that W' graph setup in GoldenCheetah as well and it's a pretty darn good predictor of failure.  I've never set it up ahead of time to see when it suggest I will fail but if I'm doing a workout and I get to the end of the 4th interval of 5 and feel totally wiped and struggle on the 5th, I generally see W' dipping pretty close to 0 at that point.  I've been able to push it negative when doing intervals in the 15-30s range (not so much in the longer stuff like 2-4 mins) lately so I suspect the next round of testing will result in some changes.