Art thou broken?

Bonjour! For these past weeks 3 kakithoners have been members of the injury/cross training club (congrats to Wong on leaving the club recently, we will miss you..), in light of that I would like to share a few excerpts from Lauren Fleshman's interview and blog that I found funny and informative...

Firstly the funny, emo one yet also kinda mirroring my feelings ( she sounds like she's going to turn into the hulk XD )

The Olympic Trials are in less than four months and I can’t even jog a 5k much less race one. This is clearly not how I pictured my season shaping up. As I walk home there are no tears. I hate everything. I want to hurt something. The fire inside me makes me impervious to the winter air. I can feel it, the rage, like a screaming kettle building inside me. It burns the backside of my eyes. I want to run over to those fisherman on the side of Pre’s Trail and snap their fly rods over my busted knee and hurl their open tackle boxes toward the river, watching the contents erupt through the sky like fireworks. 

And now the informative part, her training menu after resting for 1 month:

*in between 30s rest walk*

Day

1     5x 1:00                                             (total 5mins)

2     3x1:00//1x2:00//1x1:00                    (total 6mins)

3     1:00//2:00//1:00//2:00//2x1:00          (total 8 mins)

4     1:00//2:00//1:00//2x2:00//2x1:00      (total 10mins)

5     1:00//2:00//3:00//1:00//2:00//1:00     (total 12mins)

6     1:00//2:00//3:00//4:00//5:00              (total 15mins)

7     10:00//2x5:00                                    (total 20mins)

8     2x10:00                                             (total 20mins)

#1 week of 20mins continuous runs

#1 week longest run 40-45mins

#1 week longest run 60mins

If no pain is felt the workout progresses downward, else, stop running or retry the same workout after a few days rest.

The aforementioned program might sound like overkill, but considering that you never know whether you've completely recovered it actually makes a lot of sense to test things out gently. Of course, nothing is written in stone, it's just to illustrate the point of easing into it after a serious injury. Feel free to adjust the program to suit the degree of your injury and how you feel. However, a 50mins run directly after a long running sabbatical is definitely a bad idea (dude, you know who you are..).

Cross training such as swimming, cycling etc is a great way to keep up your fitness and  there are enough articles on the internet praising the uncountable holy benefits of cross training, so I'm not going to be redundant. A little reminder though the 10% rule may not be THE LAW but it's made for a reason so don't get over-enthusiastic ramming up the miles suddenly while cross training. (Scenario: busting your shoulder swimming a 30km week when your knee is fractured = adding insult to injury  hahaha...)

That's all folks... hope I didn't get you down with all this injury talk, here's a phenomenal 4x400m vid (check out the 3rd and 4th runners really digging deep to hold England, Australia and Nigeria at bay!)

The whole is more than the sum of it's parts. (Aristotle)