Extreme Momentum

I’ve been going through old photos to have them scanned in. I stumbled upon older race photos and I couldn’t believe how thin I looked back then. Here’s one photo of me at the 1998 Boston Marathon. I thought I was heavy then (138-142 lbs.) compared to my race weight in college (132 lbs.). I started to put on weight over the years, while I was running less, working more, and my basal metabolism slowed. Right now, I’m about 150-155 lbs. with cycling having added lots of lower body muscle mass. I remember my old college trainer, Kris Zimmerman, seeing me at our 10th college reunion. She said, “Pete, you’ve turned into a cyclist.” I asked, “How did you know?” “Because your thighs have gotten huge,” she replied. Great…now I just need more upper body lifting to look like a body builder…:)

Most athletes are familiar with tendonitis.  It’s something that usually plagues us more than once in our careers. Tendonitis is basically the inflammation of a tendon that is often caused by overuse.  For example, if you increase your mileage too quickly while running, you may overwork a tendon and cause it to become inflamed.

Right now, I’ve got a scorching case of peroneal tendonitis.  The peroneal tendons help stabilize and the foot. They run down the outside of your ankle and foot.  I’ve torn both the peronous longus and brevis while trail running and had to have them surgically repaired. Not fun. Since then, I’ve been a little paranoid about them.

Mine started bothering me around Christmas.  I was running in the snow and twisted my ankle.  Tendons on both ankles were sore the next couple of days, but I insisted on going full throttle on my training plan.  Plus, I was usually was using  cycling orthotics that put extra strain on my peroneals.  Now I’m paying for my stupidity.  I’ve scaled back the intensity of my training and started taking NSAIDs and icing several times a day. I’ve also started doing some physical therapy to help build up strength.

The thing that sucks about tendonitis is that activity usually makes the pain go away–at least while you are working out. So, if hurts, you just want to work out more, which often makes it work. That makes wanting to take it easy harder. Talk about a Catch 22.  OK, back to icing…these are some screaming banshees!

With my tendonitis and indoor training frustration, I decided to take advatange of a relatively “nice” January weekend day here in Chicago to bike along the lakefront.  The path was in pretty good condition, except for heavily traversed sections that hadn’t been salted.  I took my bullet cam and posted some footage, so you’ll see what I mean.  It was nice to see so many people out wether they were running, skiing, walking, or biking. The most fun I had was to hit the groomed (well, plowed) path on the inside of LSD. There weren’t as many people, and I rode the entire way a snow.  This ride also gave me a chance to test out the new Garmin Edge 705 (aka, Christmas present to self) paired with my PowerTap (I’ll post more about these later).  Check out the video of the ride, my bike afterwards, and the route I took.  And, yes, I admit that I was a little too “geared out” for this ride.

The video is jumpy, but the ride was pretty bumpy [NOTE: rhyme intended].  I had picked Ministry’s “Everyday Is Halloween” as the background track, but the YouTube filters flagged it so I had to replace it with a cheesy Axel F MIDI file.