Roadman today I want to talk about being injured and the journey back
Roadman today I want to talk about being injured and the journey back. Let's cue the intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our longevity? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Rodeman, welcome back to the Rodeman Podcast. It's Monday, means it's the first Rodeman Bites episode of the week. I'm not sure if I'll keep calling it Rodeman Bites. I think I do it more so to distinguish in my head that I'm not committing to talking to you guys for an hour because it forces me to be a little brief. Yeah, I do have that tendency, like a lot of Irish people to be a little long-winded. So when I say Roman Boyz at the start of the podcast, it's actually a slap around the ear to say, you know, get to the fucking point. Stop dragging it out. What is it you're trying to say to these good people? How was your weekend, everybody? What did you get up to? Did you go riding bikes? We had our A1 group ride on Saturday, which is great for him. I'm called the Roman group ride. A1's dying. It's all about Roman. We're the Roman group ride on Saturday, which is about 3 hours and coffee stop after about 90 minutes. I love it because I've done that podcast a few weeks ago about the debt of the group ride and I feel that this group ride is everything that it's the anti-group ride at the moment. It's well structured, it's hard when it needs to be heard. It's good crack, hopefully it's a good learn environment. There's not constant shouts of whole car, scream and point and it's a very chill, relaxing place to be. And honestly, it's the ride I look forward to most during the week because it's such a mix of abilities. You know, you've X-Pro's on the group and you've guys who've literally just started the group riding. So it's a brilliant learning environment. I really enjoy that. Before I jump in and talk about today's topic, which I want to talk about because one of our patreon's suffering from an injury and he's on the road back at the moment and I thought it'd be a nice way to tip the cap and say thanks for supporting patreon but also a gentle reminder for all you guys who don't support us on patreon at the moment that it is the way the podcast keeps going it is the lifeblood of this podcast so please i'm gonna post a link in the description as always it's patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch go across by me me the price of a pint of beer and just say thanks for the work on this if you're getting any value at all out of it. And please don't just assume that someone else will because it's every contribution makes a massive difference to the podcast, especially at these early stages. Coming back from injury, it's something I know a lot about the crashes come like buses all at once. And I know when I was riding the bike full time, I definitely had periods where I hit the deck. It seemed like I was nonstop hitting the deck at times and then you'd go, you know, maybe two, three years without hitting the deck and then it comes again in waves. But I was unlucky enough in my cycling to his, you know, like, trying to think, no one likes to talk about crashes. It's the thing that we all just try not to talk about. But I had a couple of standout bad ones, one, Basar at the Basque down here at the Pyrenees riding for a French team and I hit a traffic oil and really fast. I'd say upwards of 70k an hour broke, collarbone, scapula, ribs, that was particularly bad one. And then I'd crash and 2000 and 2014 riding for Stellus oncology, an American team in a bunch sprint in Detroit. And yeah, real nasty one. I broke my Glenoid fossa, a collarbone. Turned out there was a collapse long in there as well I think which was undiagnosed at the time and yeah that was a miserable experience because I couldn't get medical treatment at the time in America.
He got to love that American healthcare system they weren't sure if I…
He got to love that American healthcare system they weren't sure if I was going to be covered with my health insurance because I was in a race event and if that void of my health insurance or not and because of my injuries it was looking like it would be upwards of 200 grand if I was to go in the hospital. So I was like, this is not good. So the paramedic at the time advised me to get into the car. And my den girlfriend was at the race and we drove north of the border to Canada. And I got medical treatment in Toronto. The healthcare system was phenomenal in Toronto. But yeah, a cautionary tale to be careful and bunch sprints if you're racing in the US. But what I did learn along the way there was how to come back from injury. and I'm hopeful that this will be helpful to our Patreon and some of you guys if you're coming back from injury and you know you can interpret injury broadly to be sickness or a period of inactivity because I know you know as soon as you hit the deck and you have that time to sit back and go right I'm injured. You're morale so far as badly because you think yeah my training is down the drain I've you know invested four or five six months getting ready for this target event which is coming up a month from now and I've hit the deck, it's all wasted. And yeah, in a sense, it is all wasted so there's now getting around that. But also training does compound and it's not like it's down the drain for good. If you can get back on a footing after some simple steps that I'm going to go through, you can start building upon that previous train and set yourself up for potentially greater heights. But morale is the first thing you need to deal with. You need to get yourself happy again and realize There's a bit more to the world and riding bikes, although it's what we love to do. And we put a lot of time, we put a lot of effort in it, so we don't have to downplay that our marginalised that commitment, because that's not right-eater, but there is more to life. So it's a time to nurture those friendships and those relationships and those habits that we less just disappear in atrophy during our build-up phase. So definitely make it a priority to reconnect. Get in to see your specialist straight away. So many people self-diagnosed injuries are just think rest will help. Yeah sometimes rest helps but we've sort of two things we need to deal with. We need to deal with the symptoms, the actual pain and then we need to deal with the cause. If the cause is a bunch sprint like mine it's blunt force trauma so it's, you know, there's not much to be learned there only maybe a lesson is that don't go through a gap that's It's glows in there. Don't pretend you're a big sprinter in the lead out trans when you're not. You know, that's the cause, but if it's an overuse injury, if it's an IT band injury, we need to work at diagnosing the cause of the injury. So we don't just treat the symptoms and then get back into the same routines that actually cause the injury and make it worse the second time out because physically the injury will be worse the second time out, but I tell you, like from experience, the morale and the moral effect of the same injury a second time out, it can be devastating. I've seen people walk away from the sport with trivial injuries that they just didn't deal with. So rehab heavy to deal with the cause of the injury. For me, I'm not that big on masking symptoms. I'm not that big on taking painkillers because I'm like, yeah, it's pain. It's a bit uncomfortable, but it's there for a reason. It's my body sending me a message and it's sending me a signal to say, slow down, something's not right. And it's my body saying, you know, go and figure out what's not right and get rid of the pain.
Don't just get something to plaster over it
Don't just get something to plaster over it. It's like if you go if you have a leak in your fuel tank in your car, you know, instead of going and actually looking where the leak is and plugging the leak, you just go to the petrol station and put more petrol in and it leaks out again, but you need to keep up more petrol in. Like that's not the solution. Finding out where the hole is and plugging the hole, that's the solution. So, depending on what your injury is, you can get back on the bike quite soon after the injury, especially indoors. What I would say, absolute, non-negotiable. You take the Wahoo or the German, turn it on great because we all love having that data, but stick it in your back pocket. Because there is nothing more so destroying than riding us 40-50 watts with a perceived effort of 8.9 out of 10, and honestly of being there and it's miserable. So stick it in your back pocket and don't worry about how or don't worry about heart rate. Just worry about getting your body moving again. Indoor training in a very unstructured manner especially you know I've broken clavicles and I've been back on the turbo trainer within a week, two weeks but really unstructured. Think about your body is hit the ground at high speed and you've broken a bone. It's not just a bone that's hit the ground and smashed that's in trouble. whole body is just flooded with cortisol, that stress hormone and it just takes time to recover. As a rule, you're looking at a day getting back trying for every day you've been out. So if you've been out for two months, you're looking at two months trying to get back to where you were. Once you've gone to the physio, once you're back with that sort of unstructured indoor training and you're letting pain be or go ahead and you're building up if you have to ride 15 minutes, three times a day because you can't ride 45 minutes, You know, that's great, perfect. Let pain be your guide. As soon as it starts hurting, don't push through. There's no roses for pushing through. The next step then after you get the oil clear from your fizzy or specialist to get back, is to get back structure training. And that's all about setting small goals. Like the goal could be to ride 20 kilometers for the forest time outside. This is where I would advise you start gathering data again because what we don't want to do is do too much. We're not gathering data because we want to get a train in stimulus and we want to spend time in certain zones like we would in a build up to an event. This is nearly a fail safe. We want to make sure we don't do too much for anyone that's listened to previous podcasts on zones and setting zones. If you understand the performance management chart, which I actually most do a full podcast on how to understand the performance management chart, we don't want to build fitness up more than eight CTL points. So that's chronic training points. So that's what we call a fitness score. I'm going to do a separate podcast where I'll talk about it. We don't want to build it up more than eight points in a week because we're just running the risk of a bin or a reversal and our body not being able to cope with the extra cortisol because you've got to think of a training stress is producing cortisol. Your body is producing a shit ton of cortisol that you wouldn't regularly be producing because you're injured. So you're adding that on top. So you've got to be super careful to build that up slowly but you also got to be super careful to not add dietary stress and not add excess cortisol in the form of bad food. So you've got to be laser sharp on your diet in the periods you're off, diet and hydration and sleep is so, so important during it as well. You should be getting your minimum eight hours of sleep during the night and also advice trying to get a quick nap during the day if it's at all possible.
Once you're back with your structure training and you feel like it's…
And once you're back with your structure training and you feel like it's time to get back outside, I would just advise like I kind of have this filter I run things through and it's my risk to reward filter like what is the payoff of me going back outside versus what is the risk if I've come back from a broken clavicle and I'm going back outside on week four instead of wait until week six like the doctor's advice what's the payoff on getting for going out two or two weeks early you know if I hit a bump and I come off and I re-break to clavicle, it's at me back a hot bottle. If I hit a pot hole and it knocks it out of place, if my hand lens is compromised then I can't ride down the inside of a load of traffic and I clip a wing mirror. You've got all these risks that you typically don't have in what's a dangerous sport anyway, let's be honest. Then you're adding in all these extra risks. When you add up all those extra risks, is that worth the reward? Maybe your target event is in two weeks and it totally is worth the reward. Or maybe you're planning this big riot for your 40th birthday and it's something you've been building up to for two years. Then in that case, maybe it is a work-reward, but on a lot of occasions when you weigh up the risk and the reward, it simply is not worth it. But I would say, to finish up on this Roman Boyz Podcasts, I've been there, morale is the hard part. You've got to stay happy, you got to stay smiling, you got to realize that this will pass, this will pass, that it's not the end of the world, that you've lost a little bit of fitness, but you can build to a higher height again, regardless of your age, it's not your last chance, regardless of your age, you can build to a higher height, you can build to an absolute crescendo, if, and if, and here's the key point, you get your morale under control, you stay happy, spend that time, you know, learn new stuff, spend that time grown, spend that time smiling, spend that time with friends, spend that with family. And don't get too down on yourself. You are now one of the when we define what a roadman is. I'm sure we'll define them as a man with scars. So if this is you and this podcast is resonating, you are now a man with scars. Rob meant thanks very much for tuning into another roadman boy's podcast. I've been updating our roadman resources.com I put the little red light block, sorry blue light blocking glasses. In there I'm using RA optics at the moment. I'm using RA optics because I trialed a bunch of different blue light blocking glasses. These had the best studies behind them. These had, you know, there's a little bit of a style element too. Let's not kid ourselves and say we're not that vain. You don't want to look like a complete numpty, especially if you're wearing them around the house all the time and you have guests over. Or I Optics ticked the boxes on style, ticked the boxes on science, ticked the boxes on comfort. I love them so I've listed them in the Robmann resources. If you're not wearing blue light blocking glasses in the evenings, don't know what you're doing with your life. Go back and listen to that podcast and you will be wearing them from now on because if you're training and you're not doing the other stuff which I call it passive gains, that it's just, yep. You're undermining your own chances of success. Robmann, that is it. Enjoy your Monday and I shall chat to you again tomorrow.