Returning

People in my office need to stop bringing in delicious doughnuts.  I have a doughnut policy and it is this: no crappy doughnuts shall pass my lips. This means no Dunkin’, no grocery store, no Krispy Kreme. But bakery doughnuts get a pass and unfortunately  someone brought in a nice selection of fresh bakery doughnuts this morning which translated to me eating ½ of a chocolate cake doughnut and ½ of some sort of vanilla cakey doughnut.  Gah – so much for the spin class I took before work.

Speaking of spin classes, this one was a Ryder class at CorePower. I know they have the (probably) expensive, fancy RealRyder bikes and those bikes do manage to give you the possibility of a great upper body workout with the ‘turns’ to the right and left. But (there’s always a but) I always seem to bruise my ladybits on these bikes.  I don’t get that from regular spin bikes – just the occasional tenderass if I haven’t taken a class for a while.  I even broke out the super padded shorts for this morning’s class (I have three levels of bike shorts: tri shorts with almost no padding, regular bike shorts with a little padding (what I wore to my spin class last week), and diaper shorts with the equivalent of a maxipad under my ass) and still I have the painful ladybits. Le sigh.

I think I can finally say that I will be running this week.  I have felt not so much as a twinge in my calf since the beginning of last week despite having done a spin class, logging time on the elliptical, and walking several miles. I think the PT people want me to be able to do pass a few functionality tests like jumping, one legged calf raises, and extended time on the elliptical machine without pain and then I should be good for the Return to Run program.  I found this one online and it looks pretty good:

“Begin each session with a warm-up consisting of a 2-5 minutes brisk walk followed by your specific stretching exercise. Perform the appropriate walk/run combination based on the table below. Be sure to follow the walk/run with your stretching exercise.

Week 1: Day 1: 6x: walk -- 4.5 min/run -- 0.5 min. Day 2: 6 x: walk -- 4.0 min/ run -1.0 min Day 3; 6 x walk -- 3.5 min/ run -- 1.5 min

Week 2: Day 1: 6x: walk - 3.0 min /run - 2.0 min Day 2: 6 x walk - 2.5 min/ run - 2.5 min Day 3: 6 x walk - 2.0 min/ run - 3.0 min

Week 3: Day 1: 6 x walk 1.5 min/ run - 3.5 min Day 2: 6 x walk 1.0 min/ run - 4.0 min Day 3: 6 x walk 0.5 min/ run - 4.5 min

Week 4: Day 1: run 30 min Day 2; run 30 min Day 3: run 30 min

Upon completing week 4, resume a gradual transition back to continuous running following 2-5 minutes of warm-up and stretching. As you return to your pre-injury running level, training duration or intensity should be increased by no more that 10% per week to minimize risk of injury recurrence. Be sure to continue a stretching program in concert with your running.”

However, I know myself and if I don’t have any pain when I’m running I’ll probably condense weeks 1 & 2 and then weeks 3 & 4 and then just go from there.   I’m going to try running a little bit on Wednesday at Chick’s Night and if it goes OK with no pain then I’ll continue on with the return plan.