13 Weeks Post Surgery

I have my last Physical Therapy appointment today.  I really feel I should have more but BCN says they are not medically necessary.  Interesting that they would pay for them before my surgery when it actually was useless, but not now when I could benefit from the guidance, they won't.

I had an appointment with my surgeon last Tuesday.  She said I could go back to riding on the track, could introduce overhead strength work and start swimming again.  The X-Rays revealed no stretching of the grafts and everything is where is should be.  There will still be a small bump on my shoulder consistent with a Grade 1 separation but everything is healing well.  It will still be another 3 months before I should go back to bike racing and healing will go on for about a year.

Shoulder is feeling much better, I've avoided the things that made it sore and introduced new things that could have made it sore. 😁 I swam for the first time on Saturday.  I purposely held it to 500 yards to see how it would be.  The best description I can give is that it felt loose in the socket and slightly painful.  I was only swimming 50's on a minute so it wasn't fast.  Afterwards I ran on the LRC track and did my exercises.  In addition to the exercises I used the pull up machine with 100lbs of assist.  I am ~150lbs right now so it's like pulling ~50lbs.

I rode 204 miles last week with a mix of track and Zwift, ran 3 times and swam short once.  Only one intense day on the bike: Saturday Moring track where I finished all the drills.  It wasn't easy, but I finished them.  There were no jump-the-gap sprints so I didn't put much stress on my shoulder.

Sunday track is progressing well.  We have some new riders that are learning how to do pursuits, they seem very enthusiastic (wow I spelled that right on the first try) and are working out well.  We have a very good candidate for our fourth member of our team, I feel he fits in really well.

My strength exercises are going well.  I've increased the weight I've been working with a little because I felt some of them were just stretches and too easy to do.  I have 15 exercises to do 3 times a day and it takes me ~40 minutes to complete them as prescribed.  Sometimes I cut them to 2 sets instead of three to save time since most of the time I'm doing them twice at work.

My weight has consistently been 149-150lbs for the last week;  I'm pretty happy about that.  I would like to be down to ~142lbs by May.