Conditioning Options

I was a little down yesterday about being hurt. Part of it maybe is that early season races have started here. My club had their first training race on Saturday, and Barry-Roubaix was Saturday. (My dad got 4th place in his category!) The other part of it was that I came to the realization that I had been thinking in a pretty limited way about what I could do to stay in reasonable shape. I was frustrated that I hadn't thought a little harder and done a little more during the week.

So, here's my new list of conditioning exercises to do that shouldn't bother my knees:

• Swimming
• Heavy bag drills
• Swing sledgehammer
• Skating / hockey (only because I know it doesn't bother my knees)
• Upper body and core exercises following Tabata, minute drill, or density protocols for conditioning effect.

The list I came up with earlier in the week was: swimming. I decided that I probably didn't have enough time to get to the pool at the local school, and therefore I couldn't exercise! If I heard someone else say that, I probably wouldn't think too much of them...

Hockey was OK last night. I didn't feel particularly fit, but we also only had 3 on the bench, so it was a lot of skating. Only one more skate left this season already. My knees felt fine, but I did take a puck in the back of my leg (low calf area) so that's a little sore today.

Last point: I've been doing this training thing for a little while now (since the end of 2005), but I'm finding that some of the things I'm learning aren't carrying over from year to year. For example, I just learned (the hard way) that I should measure my bikes at the beginning of the season to make sure the setup is correct before I start riding a lot. Will I remember this at the start of 2010? It's a long way off... My experience with tapering is another thing that comes to mind as something that I end up re-learning every year. So, I want to write myself a little set of notes about my own training, broken out by time of year or training phase. Hopefully this will save me from repeating the same mistakes.