Kneecap recap#

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 02:46:05 +0000

I had planned to write an interesting and comprehensive post covering everything I've been thinking of lately, but when I started trying to work out what should be in it, I got distracted by reading all my past blog entries for the year. Something of a death knell to getting anything done.

So let's keep this strictly factual.

• I am choosing to blame my [[111 => fallen in st gallen]] fall on a combination of (1) bad luck that there was a fall in front of me; (2) being too tired to react in time and get out of its way. So the fix for that is to eat more in long races. Which means no deep introspection needed on how to prevent a reoccurrence
• Milestones in flesh healing: my face has grown back (at least to the point where I really have no excuse for not shaving it any more). My left knee has unbroken skin. My right knee is well on its way to a similar state except for being swollen. Now, this bothers me: if all the fluid on it is the result of the 111, it's been there a week and how come I never noticed it before? I am hoping (if that's the right word) the swelling is instead new and e.g. due to the wound having become infected. Washed it out, slathered it with Germolene and am typing this in bed with the knee in the air. It had better be better soon.
• Work on my skating position continues (subject to knee returning to normality). I spent an hour yesterday in a small car park doing nothing but two-footed slalom, left-footed left turns (right foot toe wheel for balance) and left parallel turns. It took ten minutes to get back to where I was last time I tried it (in St Galen, the night before the 111), which says I haven't fully internalised it yet, but at the end of the session I was whizzing around listening to my wheels squeak, so it's definitely coming along. Next things to work on are underpush (I can do something that approximates it on the right leg, not the left) and one-footed steering without the trailing toe wheel.

The targets between now and Berlin are (1) to get comfortable on my left foot outside edge; (1b) to get my fore/aft balance actually correct - some 111 photos say I'm still too far forward; (2) to heal; (3) having backed off from any kind of "dangerous" skating - fast skating and marshalling - in the interests of (2), not to lose whatever fitness I currently possess. Which is going to be either difficult or tedious, and along with the rest of them frankly impossible until my knee is better.

In the "grateful for small mercies" and/or "look how far we've come" departments: having wasted too much of this evening reading old blog entries, it gives me great pleasure to remind myself that my left knee now bends forwards not sideways when I squat, that I don't ever hear my knees creaking any more, that anklebone pain is a thing of the past, and that the blisters I picked up at Le Mans are gone, buried, forgotten and have not made a reappearance (just as well, as I have managed to lose every single roll of zinc oxide tape I've ever bought). So there is progress on some fronts, it's just that I forget the things I used to have problems with when the problems go away.

Oh, and (brief techy bit) Soks does not do Stupid things when I press C-d to delete the next character.