Week IM-20: The Physio Necessity

Having grown up playing team sports, I was never a stranger to physios (as in physiotherapists), running onto the pitch with the magic sponge and such. I’m always surprised at people who go to their doctor (or worse, just ignore) knee or back pain when often it’s just a tight muscle a physio could sort out in a few minutes.

And so, when the knees started to get sore after the long cycle and run sessions, it was to the physio I went. It’s now become a regular occurrence, every 2-3 weeks. One perspective is that physios allow the body go further than would otherwise be possible – loosening out muscles that would naturally become unusably tight when you push farther than their natural limit. Another perspective is that once you get used to going to physios to loosen out muscles, you become dependant on them. Runners in the 70’s never had physios and they were fine (..apart from the arthritic knees upon retirement in their 30’s).

Either way, it has been very useful to have the luxary of a physio who can trace certain problems to specific tight muscles and loosen them out. This week, one of the quads on the outer side of both knees had tighted up. I noticed afterwards that I wasn’t stretching it when I was stretching my quads. She loosened it out over a very painful 30 minutes.. I always seem to forget how painful those sessions are! 30 minutes pain for 6 days 23.5 hours of looseness, it’s a good trade off.

The big swim was on Monday this week – 16 x 100 meters @ 84% effort. I averaged 2:10 per 100 meters. With warmups, that was 2.4km. I did 19km of running over the week, broken into 3. I’m still trying to keep the running to short and frequent.

The cycle on Saturday was a 70km spin down to Blessington and Lackin, which worked out well. It took just over 3 hours. The weather was good, although it’s still cold. There’s still snow on most of the mountains.

The weekly totals. Twenty weeks to go: