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!

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.