Notes
Mental low point last two days. MRI is scheduled for this Friday. Currently insurance denied the request so been on the phone all day trying to sort that out which is mentally exhausting in and of itself. Already moved the appointment once waiting for approval. At this point I'm getting it this Friday regardless of whether I have to pay out of pocket or not.
Groin still feels really bad. Something just isn't right. I want to avoid surgery if possible but need to know if I'm wasting my time waiting around for it to heal if it never will. I've been injured a lot but never had something like this that didn't at least calm down after a few days off. Like usually things will calm down and will feel ok but if I run it'll start hurting a few mins in. With this it still hurts just flexing my adductors or lower abdominal, and if I try to run it'll hurt right from the first step, not after a mile or two. Really don't understand what's going on unless I'm just being impatient given how long I trained on it.
Struggling to figure out what to do right now. Really tough not biking or swimming either. Was doing 100 pullups a day each day last week but even that I could tell was irritating it. I've been doing some thinking/reflection to at least try to figure out what I can do in the future to avoid injury in the future. Looked back through the logs and of course found logs similar in tone to this one where I reflect and "figure out" what I need to do differently. Each of those probably have a bit of truth in them but of course something was still flawed as I continued to get injured over and over.
Time to take another crack at it anyway even though I'll probably still be wrong.
I looked at a graph of my weekly mileage for every week since I started logging in June 2016 until now. In my head, I'm a high mileage guy that runs 90 miles a week when I'm at my best. So, whenever I come back, I always try to build back up there. The reality is, in the course of my 7 years logging I've run a 90 mile week in maybe 10% of all weeks (Even fewer if you count the unlogged high school years that were probably maxing out at 45mi if that). Freshman year was around 60, sophomore built to around 70-75, Junior year built up to 90 over the summer, carried that through XC and winter... but then thats it! Probably a grand total of 12-16 weeks of 90mpw running. So that's my 3 year build up to 90, and in the 4 years since its just ramp up to 90 and crash over and over again.
Now, I had pretty much already come to the realization that I can't run that kind of mileage, which is why I wanted to mix in tri in order to keep up the volume. After the marathon in November where I peaked at a 100mi week, I cut my running in half as I started biking and swimming knowing that I was overtraining leading up to that race. The funny thing is now that I looked back at the data, even though I cut running in half, my total volume continued on an upwards trend through the marathon into clash miami (10-11hrs per week of running for the marathon into 12-16hrs per week of tri). Running is definitely the main problem here but its really hard to deny that the amount of swimming and biking I did and the rate at which I ramped those up didn't have an effect.
So heres the change I'm going to make. In the past, I've been smart about "slowly building" and slowly incorporating workouts etc. But I think I need to look bigger picture while I do that. Usually I just look week to week and think 10% rule until I hit 90. I think I need to respect where my body is actually at. I'd love to get back to a point where I can crank out 90 mile weeks or 12-16hr weeks of Tri. But if I'm going to get there safely I think that realistically could take years. I think when I get healthy I need to be okay with doing my normal slow build, but then capping it at say 50-60 for a few months. Maybe in 2024 I can bump to 70s, etc. And similar kind of build if I'm focusing Tri.
Its difficult because in doing that I may not go as fast in races in the short-medium term. But at this point I have to realize that my goal NEEDS to just be smart, consistent, healthy training. To be honest all I really want is to grind a little bit each day. I probably get caught up about racing more than I should.
Of course need to get healthy before I can put any of this into action. But hoping a more long-term focus will help me out when I do.