Surgery options, weekly plan, and today's personal best 10 K

When will I get my new hip(s)?

Had my orthopedic surgery appointment today. Here are the highlights (or low lights, I suppose):

• There is some underlying bio mechanical cause. We don’t know what. Never will. A certain percentage of 45 year olds are like me. I guess I am just one of the lucky few.
• The reduced mobility is a combination of osteophytes and tightening/stiffening of the capsule.
• There is nothing to be done in the short term - pain meds and when it gets bad enough...
• When I can no longer deal with the pain or the mobility I should go back to him for repair. His estimate is between one and ten years for replacement or resurfacing.
• Should I do what I am doing? It’s hard to say. He agrees, though, that since replacement is inevitable if I like it I might as well carry on.
• Looking at the x-ray and discussing things, he is surprised that I am able to do what I am doing.

So… it’s pretty much exactly what I thought. Enjoy it while I can because the end of my endurance athletic career is close on the horizon.

Here is this week's training plan:

MON - Afternoon 60 min strength. Evening 45 minute swim
TUE - Afternoon Run 10 km at 4:45/km. Afternoon Bike 45 to 60 minutes
WED - Afternoon Bike 2 hours with 10 x 30 second sprints on 3 minutes rest. Evening 90 minute swim.
THU - Afternoon Run 5 x 8 minutes at 4:40 with 8 minute easy run in between (total time 90 minutes with warm up and cool down). Afternoon swim 60 with Coach Paul.
FRI - DAY OF REST (moved from Saturday because of work conference)
SAT - Bike 2.5 hours easy.
SUN - Morning Run 18 km at 4:55/km (race pace). I will do this run on the back half of the marathon course. Afternoon Bike 45 minutes REALLY easy.

Today's timed 10 K run - a personal best

Things got off to a bad start. Yesterday (Monday) I was busy with real life such that I cancelled my strength training with Lindsay. I juggled my schedule around in order to fit was is usually an evening swim in over the lunch hour. A great plan. But, I got to the Education Pool only to discover that I did not have my goggles or my swimsuit. Heh. Oh well, an unscheduled day off.

Today, though, I did run a personal best 10 km distance as a training run. There were four stops (i.e. rests) that do not allow me to lay claim to Heather’s title as “Fastest family 10K.” She will keep that glory until the Bridge City Boogie on June 13.

Four stops – water/bathroom at the water park (stopped watch), long traffic light at top of University Bridge (stopped watch), long traffic light at 14th and Preston (did not stop watch), and stopped to assist Romanian immigrant find an address (stopped watch).

I did these 10 km after having already done a 10 minute warm up followed by 1.8 km at 4:37/km so I actually ran almost 12 km sub 4:45.

Lap    Pace    Heart

1    4:46    150
2    4:44    155
3    4:45    155
4    4:54    158 (bathroom water break)
5    4:50    152 (as an experiment, after this I turned off the Garmin pace setting and simply pushed myself)
6    4:38    164 (seems to work – fastest lap was after turning off my watch)
7    4:41    157
8    4:45    162
9    5:07    162 (this was the long light without watch stop so it was actually faster + the Romanian)
10  4:39    160

My plan for race day is to run the first 32 km tracking pace with the Garmin and then flip the switch over to only show distance. It will still beep every kilometer and show me how long the preceding km took so I will get a reference point but it is definitely a good mental aid to simply focus on pushing hard as opposed to hoping that the Garmin will keep me at pace.