losing fitness after surgery...

Hi, sorry to hear about your troubles! You're going to get a wide variety of answers, as this is one of those questions where the answer is "it depends". Most people get about 3-7 days kind of "free", where fitness loss is minimal. After that, you generally lose about 2 days of fitness for every day of inactivity. So, if you are out for 3 weeks, it will take ~ 4 weeks to recover, out for 4 weeks, 6 weeks to recover to your current fitness level, etc.

You can slow the losses down by finding alternative activities, water running, walking, etc. Just depends on your own pain tolerance, etc.

Good luck, keep us informed!

John 

The longer you have been an endurance athlete the less fitness you will lose or stated the other way the shorter you have been an endurance the quicker you will lose fitness.

I had surgery Oct 2007 after 4th year of tris and had to take 6 weeks off running and swimming. I had surgery 4 days after my final tri a HIM of the year. I was able to ride the trainer easy after 2 or 3 weeks.

It took me 3 months to get back to my running pace when I started and probably 6-8 weeks swimming. Within 4-5 months of surgery I PBed my 5K and 1/2 Mary times and 8 months after surgery I did my first IM.

If you are going to have surgery get it done asap so you have more time to recover and back to training would be my suggestion if that is supported by your doc.

Also ask your surgeon how long you will be unable to s/b/r. If they do it laproscopically recovery time might be much faster. The less time you are off the less you will lose obviously.

I agree, it depends. 

For me, I was totally out for 7 weeks, it has taken about 2 months.  I am almost to where I was when I got hurt.  I will add that the depression that went along with not being able to do anything (and the fear that it couldn't be fixed) hurt me the most.  Add that I am an emotional eater and you have a big problem.  Not only have I had to deal with the lack of exercise/training, I also have had to deal with the weight gain from the emotional eating.  

edit - sorry, typos  

I had surgery on 12/3 and was not allowed to r/s/b for a month.  Starting on 1/3, I was allowed to start running.  On 1/17 I was allowed to start biking.  Today will be my first day back in the water.

My surgeries was a large incision in the lower abdomen.  I spent the month that I was not allowed to excersize keeping my leg strength up by using ankle weights while I was at home.  I wore them from the time I got hom in the evening until the time I went to bed (as long as I was at home).  This helped a great deal.  Aerobically speaking, I did lose a little bit of fitness, in that it took a higher heart rate to run a certain pace for about the first two weeks.  That has settled down now.  Since I started biking while that was starting to settle down, I did not feel a huge aerobic issue with biking,  but I stressed the muscles used for biking as much as I could target them while not using my core muscles (huge chore) and I still felt some downfall there.  Swimming - talk to me around 6PM.

I had two open (not laporoscopic) hernia repairs on January 12.  You can take a look at my log to see how it has gone for me.  I walked a LOT right after the surgery.  I'm back to biking and running now and feel pretty good!

Full disclosure - I relished the opportunity to NOT run for a few weeks due to some knee pain I had been having.

Thank you all so much for your quick and thorough responses ~ You guys are the best and i can always count on this forum to answer my questions. Thankfully I also have a great MD and he wants this thing out pretty soon, so i'm hoping that I will be up and at 'em in March, and have three months to at least become Sprint-ready. Because it is not an emergent surgery I might have to deal with the discomfort but I'll get this done as soon as there is an opening for it! I'm not as worried about the run as I am regaining the swim (My weakest area by far). I'm assuming the bike leg will be the easiest to recooperate. I can't wait until I can hop on that road bike again. I've really missed it this winter. I'll check out the 2 training logs to, to see how you guys conquered the beast of recovering fitness 

Thanks again so much <3

re::chosenprovidence - 2009-02-04  5:56 PM
I had my gallbladder out in October and ran a half marathon 9 days post surgery. My time was slower than initially planned (I ran an 11 minute mile for the race) but all things considering not too bad

Awesome- a half Mary 9 days post-op!!! I am feeling a lot better already I will have at least three months to get seriously back in gear and at least make sure I am Sprint ready. Thanks again