Catching Up, Stepping Back

First, lest you think otherwise, no, that is not me in the photo for this post. I'm not sure if this is meant to be an overhead squat or a snatch, but I don't do either of those lifts. I also don't have a garage to lift in, and I would never wear red shoes. Moving on....

As of my previous entry, I thought I had just completed the first week of C25K, and I was pretty happy with myself. Unfortunately, I was incredibly mistaken. I don't know where I got those time intervals from (30s run, 2m walk) but that is not even close to the first week's workout. This would explain why it was so easy. The actual week-one workouts for C25K are 60s run, 90s walk. Oops. So I guess you could say that I started with a week zero.

I also upgraded my activity tracking hardware; I had been using a Suunto Ambit, but since the day job gave me an unexpected bonus, I decided to spend the money on something sort of frivolous (in the sense that I really didn't need it) but also useful and which, two weeks on, I'm glad I bought: a Garmin Fenix 5X with the HRM-TRI chest strap. Since this new watch has an optical HR measurement device, the idea is that you basically wear it all the time; it tracks the steps you take, stairs that you go up/down, your stress level, your sleep quality (although I have no idea how it actually measures this, and I think it's somewhat questionable), and all kinds of other fitness-related data. I'm actually pretty impressed by this thing, although I wish that I didn't have to wear it quite so snugly on the wrist in order for the optical HR feature to work properly. I find that I have to switch it back and forth between my left and right arms because it starts to get a little annoying after awhile. I probably have it on too tightly.

So far I'm quite impressed; this thing makes me want to run more just so I can see what other kinds of data or analysis it's going to spit back at me. The thing that's particularly useful for my ACL rehab is that it gives me GCT (ground contact time) balance when I run, so I can see if I'm spending the same amount of time on my left foot vs. my right (I'm not). The thinking is that as my shit heals, I should get closer and closer to 50/50. Oh, and it tracks non-running exercises ridiculously well; not only can you enter reps and weight as you go along, but the first time I wore this thing while deadlifting, it somehow managed to figure out that I was deadlifting, even before I specified the exercise. It's not always accurate in that regard, but still, that was cool.

Anyway, with that, let's start off by getting caught up on workout logs.

08 January: C25K - Week 0.5, Day 1
I'm still not doing the 'proper' intervals; to make things a little easier when I'm on the treadmill, I did 60s run, 2m walk. Biometrics

10 January: C25K - Week 0.5, Day 2
Actually ran outside for this one; it's interesting to compare my pace when running outside vs. running on the treadmill - even though the treadmill I like to use is completely manual-powered, there's still a pretty noticeable difference between the two. My run intervals are roughly 10min/mile here, but on the treadmill it's closer to an 8 minute mile. Odd. One other point to note here is that my GCT balance actually looked pretty good - 50.4/49.6. Biometrics

12 January: C25K - Week 0.5, Day 3
Still running outside, still modifying the intervals to be 60s run, 2m walk. GCT balance is drifting considerably, which is not good. Biometrics

16 January: C25K, Week 2, Day 1
The actual workouts for C25K are 6 reps of 90s run / 2m walk, but to keep things easy, I decided to do 90s run / 90s walk, so that way each one of my intervals would be exactly 3 minutes. Then I threw in a couple more 60s jog intervals to make it to 30 minutes total. GCT balance favors my left leg by over 2%. Biometrics
After finishing up the run, I decided to do some deadlifts. This is where the new fitness tracker watch comes in really handy; all my sets, reps, and weights are recorded for me, so while I will list it here, it's pretty neat to be able to see everything on one page with all the HR data and such. Also, I don't understand why 400lbs is such a damn barrier when 385 was fairly easy. Maybe I'll get 400 next week if I don't think about it. This time around: 155x6, 225x4, 275x2, 315x2, 385x1, 400xNOPE! Biometrics

18 January: On which day we attempt to squat
This was pretty miserable, to be honest. Not one of these reps felt comfortable, and at least based on the ones that I recorded video of, none of them were low enough, either. I didn't have any problem coming up with the weight, but going down with it just never felt right. This makes me think (more on this in a bit) that the rehab process is going to take a lot longer than I had originally expected. Here are the biometrics, and here are the sets - Squat: 45x8, 135x6, 185x6, 235x4, 235x2, 135x8
Feeling demoralized from that, I decided to do a bit of treadmill running as well, so I got my C25K Week 2, Day 2 taken care of. I did the 6 reps of 90s run, 90s walk, then I walked a bit and did a small amount of full-on sprinting just to see how fast I could go. My current top speed is 13.6mph, which is not too much less than my pre-injury top speed of 14.1. The data for the run was captured separately and can be found here.

20 January: More leg days ahead
I didn't feel like running on the treadmill at my apartment complex, so I did a short 5 minute bike warmup and then did my 100-rep leg press interspersed with some random upper body shit on the machines. Yet another machine in the fitness center has a broken seat, which makes it really hard to bench properly. :-( However, on the plus side, it's kinda cool that the workout log tells me how many pounds I lifted (32000!) over the course of this session.
Exercises performed:
-- single-leg leg press (120x10x10)
-- chest press (135x10, 185x10)
-- lat pull down (160x10, 185x10)
-- machine shoulder press (140x10)
-- static hold (horse stance, basically) - 60 seconds

That gets us caught up with the workouts, and now I'm going to take a minute to just piss and moan a little bit. I'm almost 8 months post-surgery, and while there are plenty of activities that I seem to have no problem with, such as running or deadlifting, there are also still plenty of things that remain a challenge, such as squatting or going down the stairs with a normal gait. The conclusion that I am rapidly coming to is that when they tell you that it's a 6-month rehab process for ACL surgery, what that really means is that it takes 6 months or so for whatever grafting and reattaching they did during the surgery to heal sufficiently so as to not be all fucked up. It doesn't mean that you're going to be anywhere near 100% after 6 months. Maybe if you're Adrian Peterson or RG3 or Lindsey Vonn or some other superstar athlete that plays sports for a living and makes enough money from doing it to pay for levels of treatment far above what the average person gets, it might be possible to get back to full speed/strength in short order, but for everyone else? Don't count on it.

I was reading a couple of blogs from other people who have gone through similar surgery (both of them had autografts rather than allografts) and one of the guys didn't attempt to ski until almost 3 years post-surgery. My surgeon told me that I was cleared to ski at the beginning of December, but given how badly it went when I tried to squat (there's just no spring in my legs, and I could feel myself overcompensating on the left leg due to lack of confidence in the right leg), I'm increasingly doubtful that I will be skiing at all this season. My knee feels completely fine when I'm just sitting around, but it also starts to feel entirely weird (like it's still swollen) when I start using it a lot, and the strength imbalance remains nontrivial. To my detriment, I've somewhat fallen off the PT wagon these past couple of weeks due to the holidays and scheduling and whatnot, but either way, I think I have to reset my expectations a bit here.

I go in to see my PT tomorrow, at which time I want to ask her exactly when it is that my knee is supposed to feel completely normal again, or if that's just never going to happen at all. Based on the blogs I've read (because we all know that random blog entires are the best sources of information!) it really seems to me like I should expect to be rehabbing throughout all of 2018, and maybe I'll be skiing NEXT season. I definitely don't want to go out there and reinjure this shit, or worse yet, get some other injury - this is not a process I ever want to repeat. And I know that a non-trivial part of this is mental; there is going to be a point where I just have to trust that my body is recovered and get past the fear of fucking it up again, but I just don't think I'm there yet. The reason I have so much trouble with the one-legged squat in PT is because my brain knows that my leg can't do it. Or at least it thinks it knows that.

So if I've learned anything from the last week or two it's that I just can't let up on the PT exercises and that this whole process is nowhere near from being over. I've talked about trying to attack this problem from multiple angles, but I haven't really done much other than the rehab exercises, and so I need to get on that, too. What I mean here primarily is trying to lose some weight, which I think will happen on its own if I stick with the running and spend time in the gym doing actual workouts, but I'm also going to try a third solution.

Without going into a bunch of detail (you can Google it if you really care) I am going to give BPC-157 and TB-500 a whirl. No, I'm not announcing to the whole Internet that I'm about to take a bunch of illegal drugs (i.e., 'roids) - these are both peptides which are entirely legal (TB-500 is banned by WADA, but that doesn't matter to me because I don't compete in any sports at any level where there would be any drug testing) and derived from substances that are already produced by the body. BPC-157, for example, is derived from the gastric juices in the gut that repair the stomach lining. Do these things actually work? There's a lot of bro-science out there which suggest that they do. There are also plenty of studies on PubMed that show all sorts of healing properties - if you're a rat. There aren't many (any?) published studies on human subjects, although I suppose that just means that you could say I'm being my own lab rat, in which case everything should work out just fine. Worst-case scenario, I'm out a few bucks and nothing happens.

Whether or not I actually attempt to SQ injections or just take the shit orally remains to be seen; I'm not a big fan of needles and I minimize the risk of things going wrong if I go with oral administration, but if these things actually work, it's likely that I'd see more benefit sooner by going with the injection route. This is where the bro-science disagrees; some folks say that it doesn't matter, other people say that oral administration won't work as well. We will find out soon enough; I can't do anything until I get some syringes to reconstitute the peptides into a liquid form anyway. The one thing that I do know is that I am sick of my knees (yeah, both knees hurt, but for different reasons) being sore, and I'm open to any methods at all which show some legitimate promise of working.

Better living through chemistry!