Physiotherapy

At the best of times, I have at least one, and usually two or three aches or pains that affect my triathlon training.

For the record - here are the current main ones and what I'm doing about it.

Calf(s)

Recurring calf problems, which I'd gotten rid of for over a year, have come back. On the Wednesday evening run following Windsor triathlon, my left one went, and left me limping home. I rested it and fairly quickly was ready for Worthing Triathlon. Then, the Wednesday after that 20 minutes running made it happen again. After a week's rest, I still had pain even walking, so went to John Cooke for some analysis.

I have scar tissue between the 'bellies' of my calves. He also mentioned the soleus but I'm not very good at remembering these details. This has probably been there for years he said, which doesn't surprise me, I've had the problem for years.

He took out some medieval torture implements and pummeled the area on both legs for a while. A week later, this was still very painful to touch. I also have to do some heel drop exercises on stairs.

The good news is that it should be fixable. I'm determined to get to the bottom of this injury, as it stops me from doing the endurance running training that I need for Ironman races.


Shoulder

I did something to my right shoulder upwards of 10 years ago, I can't even remember now what or when, but it has never recovered. I asked the doctor, and got referred to the local hospital physio department where I went and had it looked at by a young lady called Lorna.

I described the issues; problems lifting my arm up to take off t-shirts, a weakness when swimming that makes it difficult to breath on the left when doing front crawl and a complete inability to do backstroke at all, pull-up and press-up issues. It's the swimming that's a real problem now - I just can't pull hard with my right arm, and it is affecting both my stroke form, and my pull speed. I have to get faster at swimming, and I've made good progress in the last few weeks, but this could be a limiting factor.

She tested it and said I have a muscle imbalance and need to work on exercises to rebalance this. I will try and do these, but I'm not confident, the exercise was quite difficult to understand and I'm not sure if I'm doing it right.


Knee

I twisted my left knee on the stairs about 9 years ago - it never recovered and I'm aware of it almost all the time. The pain isn't severe and is actually more evident if I'm sitting or walking around than when exercising. It's much better now than it was before I started triathlon training - I attribute that to stronger muscles around it helping it out, but I've noticed it a bit when doing hard cycling recently.

I asked the doctor and she said not to worry about it. She didn't suggest any treatment, just painkillers. She said I was perfectly free to exercise hard on it, so I'll keep on doing that and see what happens. I may try for a second opinion on that sometime though if it restricts my training.

That's about it - I'll moan about my ankle and hip some other time :-)