Author Archives: garethsb

Enjoying the water

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These last few weeks, as well as going to the Tri2O Triathlon Club Monday night swim, I’ve found I can get a lane to myself at the Basingstoke Sports Centre if I pick my time. Two swims a week is unheard of for me and I can feel my technique improving. A couple of weeks ago I swam the first 2km of bilateral breathing I’ve done in 25 years or so! Jon and I have decided to do the Jubilee River Swim together in July (like last year), and we’ve just signed up for the 5km individual event of this year’s Swimathon, in a couple of weeks time. (That’s the same weekend as the Tri2O Swim Centre opens for the season, hurrah!)

The Swimathon is in aid of Marie Curie Cancer Care, so if you’d like to support their amazing work providing nursing care and support to terminally ill people and their families, please sponsor me.

A knee’s ups and downs

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Today has been quite representative of how frayed my nerves are as I’m gradually increasing the training load this month.

I went for a cheeky half hour swim last night (before tucking into a Friday curry!), which generally felt OK apart from one tumble turn out of 80 where I planted my feet on the wall and twisted too much… It made my knee scream. I was worried at the time but by the end of the swim I thought I’d got away lightly. Later on though, I couldn’t straighten the leg fully, and it didn’t want to take my weight this morning either. Argh!

Then having fretted all morning I went out for a ride and had a really good 90 minutes on the bike in the spring sunshine. Knee joint didn’t complain once, and I’ll take the muscle aches around and about.

The surgeon warned me the rehab wouldn’t be completely smooth!

First workouts after knee op

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I’ve been repeating the programme from Tuesday’s physio appointment, and today, as well as the strength and conditioning exercises, I went for a short walk round the block and spent 15 minutes on the turbo, spinning lightly so that I just about broke into a sweat. The knee hasn’t protested; very encouraging.

Hopefully that means I’ll be OK to resume some gentle cycling quite quickly, but the physio did reinforce what the surgeon told me, that I must not subject the knee to any impact for 6-8 weeks, by which they mean absolutely no running. While I was out for my walk, I was thinking about how best to avoid losing my running form, and I remembered an article I’d read about the similarity of the training stimulus provided by steep uphill walking to running, except of course for being very low impact (coincidentally I find that article has been rehashed and republished just yesterday as a running workout of the week, which seems to happen a lot with Matt Fitzgerald’s posts…). Sounds like something to try anyway.

Knee MRI

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Having had a first appointment with Mr. Mike Risebury, consultant orthopaedic surgeon, on Monday, I’ve just come back from an MRI scan to confirm whether I have a meniscus tear. I have a follow-up with Mr. Risebury in a few days time, but I thought it’d be fun to try to read the MRI scan myself!

And as far as I can tell, a tear is quite clear in these pictures. The arrows I’ve drawn show what I think is fluid (white) leaking into a tear in the mensicus (black).

This is a slice through my left knee, looking from the front:

2015-01-MRI-left-knee-from-front-with-arrowAnd this a slice through the same knee, looking from the left:

2015-01-MRI-left-knee-from-left-with-arrowIt’ll be interesting to find out if I’ve read the MRI correctly, and whether we’re then going ahead with an arthoscopic partial meniscectomy.