Friday, January 9, 2009

Ice ice baby

On October 21 last year I broke my left wrist in six places after falling on ice. It was multifragmentary intra-articular, the doctor told me. No idea what that meant at the time, but I do know now. I like to skate (World Champion Sven Kramer and I share the same great-grandmother) and as the Netherlands has many indoor halls with a 400 meter ice track, this is possible from early October on. Actually I had bought a pair of new skates: real Pro stuff: Viking thermoplastic shoes and Maple red devil blades. Great. But all that doesn’t matter when you fall. I wasn’t going to fast and had time to recover some. As a result I fell over forward and involuntary stretched out my left arm. Bang. The pain was intense. I more or less passed out and was taken to the hospital and operated on three days later.
Of course I couldn’t much use my arm afterwards and wasn’t able to do any biking, or running. The only thing I could do was walk and so that’s what I did. I used to take the bus to work and walk nine K’s back home, four times a week. Five weeks after the surgery the doctor who operated on me gave me the green light. I was good to go. Biking (on my commuter bike) was rather scary at first but felt good after a few tries. Swimming was a little painful, but bearable. Running went well straight away. My first training was a 1.40 hour run. No problem at all. Then it was time to get back on my powercranks. I hadn’t used them for five straight weeks but I was as if I had never stopped riding them.
The only thing that I haven’t done yet is skating (a mental thing, not physical). It’s a pity really because for the first time in many years there’s ice everywhere. But hey, I am grateful for what I am able to do.

You might recall I have had trouble with my left leg since starting using powercranks back in 2004. This fall I thought of a solution and bought an adjustable left crank, set it at 165 mm (I normally use 175) and got to work. The result was amazing. For the first time in four years my left leg actually felt normal during PC-use. I’m looking forward to a new season in which I will try to run my first (and last) 100K race. Training will include a lot of powercranking.

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