Risk / Reward

I've been reading Joe Friel's blog lately. I knew that he started one some time ago, but he seems to have been posting more frequently. There's some great stuff on there. Some of the posts that caught my attention were about risk/reward and training consistency. They are relevant to my current situation...

So, I'm pretty much over my cold now. I basically missed a whole week of training because of it. Consider this though, I was starting to get a sore throat on Sunday morning. I elected to play hockey anyway, knowing that it would further stress my body and mean that I'd only get about 6 hours of sleep on Sunday night. Had I skipped hockey and taken the whole day off, I would have reduced the physical stress, and I could have gotten a lot more sleep. Maybe I would have still gotten sick, but maybe not. One of the points Friel made in a post was that professional atheletes are often much more conservative in their workout choices than amateurs. It's key to train in a such a way that you avoid illness, injury, etc. He makes the analogy of owning a million-dollar race horse; if you were responsible for training that horse, you'd never push it to the brink of injury or breakdown. Which leads to my next point.

As I started feeling better (Friday), I decided to get back on the bike just to do some easy spinning. I did keep the intensity and duration in check, so this wasn't a problem for my cold. But, my right knee soreness (PFS-type) came back almost immediately (this was a problem that cropped up on my long ride last Saturday).

It's really unusual for me to have pain in my right knee, and especially PFS-type pain. This hasn't happened to me since I was a beginner. So, after my ride on Friday night, I decided to check my saddle height. Sure enough, it was about a quarter inch too low. Having the saddle too low is pretty much a textbook cause of PFS. I should have been more careful with this on the Saturday ride in the first place, and turned for home as soon as it started bothering me, but I didn't. I probably should have also checked my bike setup before I started riding a lot again this year. I vaguely remember messing with my saddle at the end of last year now, and I probably just didn't put it back in exactly the right spot.

So, I'm fairly confident I've found the cause of the problem, but now I have to deal with the consequences. Probably if I hadn't pushed too far last Saturday it wouldn't have been a big deal, the time off from my cold would have been enough for me knee to recover, but it obviously hasn't been. I'll just have to take it easy on the bike for awhile until this clears up. Potentially, this also puts my participation in the Barry-Roubaix next weekend at risk... a couple hours of grinding out hills in the cold is not what the doctor ordered for knee recovery.

I'm putting Friel's risk/reward graph up on my training board (which I need to post about), so I'm frequently reminded about it.