Knee injury flares up again

The weekend just gone (being 3 weeks before Ironman) needed to be a big weekend of training.  My legs felt quite fatigued after the Saturday bike/run session but I was still determined to do a long ride on the Sunday.

Despite the constant rain for the first 2 hours of the ride, I managed to clock up 179km and then follow this with an 8.3km run.  This lifted the week's training to over 16 hours - it included 3 swims (7.3km), 2 rides (254km), 6 runs (29.8km) and 4 core strength sessions - 305 Slowtwitch points.  Not the 20 hours and 400 points I would have liked, but still a pretty decent week of training.

My injured hip handled the big weekend without a problem, but unfortunately my patella tendon injury was not so lucky.  The hard Saturday ride followed by the very long Sunday ride stiffened up my quad muscles and when they get tight they pull on the patella tendon.  I had intended to run 10km off the 179km ride on Sunday.  The run had been going surprisingly well.  Despite the very long ride I was easily able to maintain my target run pace and felt no discomfort from my hip.  However I experienced 3 short pangs of pain just below my knee within a 30 second period, so I stopped running and walked the rest of the way home.

At first I was devastated, worried that this indicated that I would never be able to finish the run in the Ironman.  This was one of my few tests of running off the bike and it had ended with failure.  But now I believe it was simply due to my quads and ITBs getting too tight - a combination of the two rides and me neglecting my quads whilst I paid more attention to the hip injury.

I had a physio session for my hip this morning which went well.  It would seem the hip injury is becoming a non-factor, but I'll know better once I get some longer runs under my belt (although time is fast running out).  Tonight I have a massage booked with Burkey and I'll get him to concentrate on loosening up my quads and ITB.

Even though I have such little time left (considering people usually have a 2 week taper for Ironman), I will still have to tread very carefully with my running this week.  Whilst every extra kilometre I can run will help me, any injuries at this stage will not have enough time to recover before the race.