After my long 18km run on Sunday, I pulled up with a sore quad. This put a slight dent in my plans to have a huge training load this week. I tried stretching, foam roller and self massaging, but I couldn't find anything that seemed to improve the quad.
Due to the long drive back from Bright, Monday was always planned as an easy day, but I had a long 120km ride planned for Tuesday morning with Kevin from Gravity Zero. After the Monday night swim squad (where I posted a new 100m FS PB - 1m25s) I decided to go for an easy jog along the beach in the hope this might loosen up my quad. However after continuous pain for 400m it was obvious the run was not going to help. So the Tuesday morning ride was now off the cards.
I tried unsuccessfully to book a Physio appointment on Tuesday, but luckily I was able to score a massage appointment with Burkey. He worked pretty hard on my quad and improved it a lot. Burkey's thought was that I over stretched the muscle during the downhill sections of my long run. I've been avoiding any hills due to my knee, so my muscles probably lack conditioning in this respect and therefore more susceptible to this type of injury.
Feeling better, I decided to do my long ride on Wednesday morning, and instead of 120km, I decided to make it 180km. A loop between Frankston and Port Melbourne is 90km, so I decided doing 2 loops would be the best plan. There were no big hills (good for my injured knee) and I could use my house as an aid station between loops to replace water bottles, nutrition and apply sunscreen and chamois cream.
I didn't feel any discomfort from my quad, Burkey had done a great job with the massage, but my knee was really starting to ache. At about the 40km mark I decided to stop and raise the seat another 3mm. This modification seemed to work, as the pain in my knee did subside a little - hopefully this may be the magic bullet that finally helps me get over the knee injury. It was a stiff headwind all the way to Seaford and I pulled back into home at the 75km mark - I hadn't done the loop up to Frankston yet. There was no pain in my quad, my knee wasn't too bad, but everything felt very average, except my bum which felt outright awful.
The temperature had increased since my early morning start, so I removed my vest & arm warmers, had a toilet stop, applied sunscreen and replaced my Optimiser bottle. Strangely I hadn't touched the sports drink or any of the other nutrition - I think the noise of the traffic early on and then the deafening noise of the headwind caused me to miss a lot of the timer alerts on my bike computer. The stop had been longer than expected, especially after I had to chase the neighbour's cat back out of the house so I could lock up, but the plus side was that I felt quite refreshed when I hopped back on the bike. Of course it helps with you start riding with tail wind again. I had intended to continue onto Franskton, but through force of habit had turned right heading back to Port Melbourne. This meant I would finish this lap with only 150km on the clock and would need to do an extra 30km loop at the end.
Strangely enough the second lap felt better than the first, although the wind had picked up and the ride back to Seaford was particularly difficult. It would have been so easy to end the ride after 150km, but after another quick stop at home I headed out for the last 30km. The ride itself wasn't very fast, only averaging just over 27kph, but I am very satisified and extremely happy to now have a 180km ride under my belt.
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