Sidlined for now

It's been a challenging time lately. Two weeks ago the MRI revealed that I have a partial tear in one of my tendons on my left knee(Partial tear of the deep fibers of the distal quadriceps tendon a the patellar insertion). Expected healing time: 6 weeks. In my exploration of options I discovered a relatively new medical procedure called 'Injectable Platelets & Growth Factors' which I underwent today. The process which comes out of Standford and has been used with a couple of Sea hawks players this year goes as follows: A small amount of blood is drawn. The blood is then placed in a centrifuge and spun to separate the platelets and growth factors from other blood component. The now 5 times concentrated growth factors are then injected into the injured area. The idea is to increase healing time by having a large concentration of growth factors in the injured area.

So far so good. The knee of course now hurts significantly more than before due to the injection. That is expected to get better over the new few days.

To add to it all: I overcompensated with my right leg and strained an abductor....so for now I am totally off the bike (and off the gym floor).

Over the last week I spent a lot of time thinking about my options and what decisions I need to make when. I want to handle my injuries both smartly and tenaciously. Smartly, in that I will not start RAAM injured. Nor will I start it without the proper training (i.e. not with significantly less than 5,000 miles since the beginning of the year). Tenaciously, in that I will move everything in my power to get this injury under control and still train properly for RAAM.

I will lay low and do virtually nothing for the next seven to ten days to give my body time to heal. I will then take it day by day.

At a high level, I have set two deadlines for making the go/no go decision. The first one is a soft one the second a hard go/no go decision.

The first one is a crew practice ride on April 10th. I want to be able to do this but will be OK with a bit of issues and pain. I however, will keep the option of starting RAAM open, even if I have to cancel the ride(although that would admittingly be difficult mentally). Second (and hard) deadline is the week of April 20th to 26th. I will need to be able to put in a huge week (800+ miles or so) with very little issues. If I won't be able to do that then I will pull the plug and not start RAAM.

It's all part of the journey. As everyone who is involved with RAAM knows: simply getting to the starting line is an accomplishment. Send me good karma :-)