Officially Cleared

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Thanks to last week’s snow, my surgery followup was postponed until this week, but it went great!  I’m healing like a champion and cleared to resume activities, including swimming.  My doctor did recommend I not do any insane ab workouts, because even though it would be really hard to cause a hernia, better safe than sorry.  Besides, who wants to do an insane ab workout?  The regular ones are hard enough!

Of course, my energy levels aren’t back to normal and won’t be for 8-12 weeks after surgery (I’m not quite 4 weeks out).  So I’m not quite back to regular workouts.

For example, this weekend, I got on my trainer and decided to do a “long” ride, time to be determined by how I felt.  I was doing 2 hour plus rides prior to surgery.  At around 80 minutes, I was definitely feeling the fatigue but did some easy pedaling to get me to 90 and called it quits.  I’m not disappointed in this at all.  I got in the exercise and it’s more than I was able to do the week before.  But I’m also not going to push myself.

So as planned, the rest of March (what few days there are left) and the month of April is going to be all about training by feel and not beating myself up about missed exercise.  I am, of course, making sure to do my PT exercises because I have to get this hip into shape if I want to be able to run.  And it means going to the pool at least once a week, even though I pretty much never feel like going.  I’m always glad to have gone.

Yesterday, I had Physical Therapy.  I walk there and back, and it’s about a mile each way.  My session is 30 minutes of table work followed by 30 minutes of exercise.  By the time I got home last night, I was exhausted, and that’s not my norm.  Typically after PT, I was able to do a solid bike ride, even with that two mile walk.  It just goes to show that I’m just not quite there yet.

I’m tempted to do an FTP test on my bike this weekend to get an idea of where I am, simply because it will be nice to see the improvement, rather than work all month and then do a test and look at how much fitness I’ve lost.  I know that right now, I’m not as strong as I was.  That’s totally okay.  I think I’m going to try to chart the improvement, because it’s pretty much guaranteed to happen!