April in review: PT, bike, box

May training by minutes.

I’m so glad it’s May so I can stop seeing that stupid Justin Timberlake meme every time I turn around. I don’t remember it being so omnipresent in previous years; maybe I just blocked it out of my memory.

ANYWAY. The beginning of the month means a look back at the previous month. April had its ups and downs: I did a lot of PT, I dusted off my boxing bag, I did some weight training, and I finally did some yoga. I also had to cut my bike workouts way short and way easy to stop irritating my knee, didn’t make it to the pool at all, and still can’t run.

I logged about 13 hours of PT in 19 sessions, 4 at the clinic and 15 at home. This is up from March, so that’s good! (Although I was on vacation for a week in March, which skewed my totals a bit.) My therapist says she sees improvement in my muscle strength, and I have knee pain less often, so I am going to keep plugging away.

I had to cut biking way back because my hour-long rides with low-to-medium levels of resistance were still inflaming my patella, so I only rode a total of 65 fake trainer miles in 9 sessions over 7 hours, 13 minutes. Blech. I mean, I guess it’s a metric century? This was way down from last month. Honestly, these rides are so boring, every other day for 5 fake miles (about 35 minutes with the resistance way down) is about all I can handle.

I lifted weights 6 times, which included 3 full rounds of heavy/body moves split up into 5 sessions, and 1 barre class for the first time in a while. This was also up from last month. The good part of not being able to ride very long is having a bit of extra time to do half a weights workout afterward.

I also randomly did 2 sessions with my boxing bag for 45 minutes each and 1 yoga session for 15 minutes. I thought I was doing OK with stretching since I do a lot of it as part of my PT, but NOPE, my hips are locked up as tight as Ford Knox. Gotta work on getting this back into the rotation.

Overall, April was 37 sessions in about 24.5 hours. That’s more than a session per day, so I’m not going to complain.

Let's also take a look at how my loose goals for 2018 shook out for the month of April:

Work through my health issues and re-start a training schedule that gets me back to racing. Still in progress. I am hoping to be able to do the fun 5K I have done for the last few Julys.

Run some cool places, maybe another marathon. Still in progress. “Run cool places” might just be my neighborhood, at this point, but I’ll take what I can get.

Work on whole-body health, incorporating things like yoga and pre-hab. Still in progress. Like, very slight progress, but still progress.

Keep a healthy work-life-training-family-friends-other balance. I hung out with family a bunch of times, including Easter and celebrating my mom’s birthday and an award for my father-in-law. I went out to brunch with friends a few times, and hung out with other friends I hadn’t seen in months. I visited the velodrome again and attended a first aid/AED training. Of course I never, never, think there are enough hours in the day, but I think I did OK with balancing things in April.

Have fun. There was a bunch of that, too. It wasn’t EXCITING, but I still had some good times.

On to May. Hopefully I will have lots of good stuff to report a month from now.