Channel Swim 12: Swim injured – a hiccup? Or the first crack
It was all going so well it had to be too good to be true….
Every week the distances were going up, and every week my body was meeting the challenges smoothly and for the most part without even minor grumbles.
I had a workshop in Dublin, then two weeks in Malaysia and Poland all coming up on consecutive work weeks and I knew it was going to be tough staying on target with the travel, jetlag and all day and evening meetings consuming time like I consume calories after a bunch of long swims. Trying to keep ahead I was determined to make the last week before this tornado hit clean and complete. I didn’t realise how completely the wheels were about to come off.
I’d not swum on Wednesday thanks to an early meeting at work – this meant I already was feeling the ‘tick… tick… tick’ pressure of ‘catching up’, but I’d felt dreadful all day. Feeling physically and mentally exhausted I could feel some sort of a bug wreaking havoc on my ability to function.
I got home, ate a fast meal with my family, then went and crashed out in the spare room. I was in bed and asleep before seven. At five thirty the next morning when the alarm went off I knew immediately I was in trouble. It felt like I’d slept funnily and my neck was stiff and sore and wouldn’t let me turn my head to the right properly.
I’m sure another swim will sort it all out…
I shrugged my shoulders, immediately regretted the shrug, pulled on my trunks and headed to the pool. If anything was going to sort out a stiff neck it was 7.7k of front crawl.
The swim didn’t help.
It didn’t exactly slow me down, but I was constantly aware of my neck. I got out and tried to ignore the warmth and the pain by focusing on the fact I’d just swum nearly 8k at a 1:56/100m pace and 84% of the time my HR was in Zone 2. If you don’t nerd out on stuff like this, the translation is I was swimming fast, for a long way and really not working hard at all even when the swim set included some sprints to finish things off. Its exactly what I need to be doing on Channel day.
My neck got more and more sore as the day went on. I decided to award myself Friday morning off even though this would mean I wouldn’t catch up and would finish the week short. This decision making capability is a new win for me as I’m historically terrible at stopping when I’ve hurt myself. I had the club swim in the evening anyway, so it wasn’t like I would miss the whole day.
Things weren’t much better by the Friday evening – I chatted with friends as we waited for the session to begin, quickly let Hannah and Lou (the coaches) know I was struggling before we hit the water, swam two fast lengths and immediately got back out. I do wonder when everyone else in the lane noticed I was gone….
In the water, I could feel the whole of my right side not rotating properly and although it felt like I could force it I didn’t want to tear myself apart trying to compensate. I was starting to recognise this was actually a real problem and I wasn’t going to be able to swim injured. Lou and Hannah were both supportive and agreed with the decision to send myself home. I awarded myself Saturday morning off as well, hoping it would come good, trying to turn a negative into a positive, but inside I was raging at myself.
Pressure, pressing down on me
Saturday came, and I told Jo I was feeling much better. She knows when I’m lying, even if I don’t, and she knew I wasn’t right still; but I was feeling the steady and unrelenting pressure continue to build and felt I needed to get back in the water as soon as I could.
Hannah was reaching out to me while this was going on – she was concerned as much about my mental state as physical and knew what I was feeling. It appears she also knows when I’m lying; in fact, if I stop to think about it I’m probably not good at fibs. If Hannah told me to run through a wall as part of the training I would do it, but the flipside of that is that when she tells me its ok to listen to my body that’s the permission I need to ignore the pressure and do what I need to.
Thats why when the alarm woke me early on Sunday I sat up, flexed my neck, groaned and laid back down again.
With early work meetings on Monday blocking a swim I’d now missed a full 3 sessions and a total of around 24k of swimming. All I could think about was getting back in the pool. I needed to do something.
Don’t swim injured, seek help early
I reached out to Carl, my physio who has managed to work wonders on what have mainly been leg related issues and asked for an emergency appointment. I’ve learnt the hard way that if something’s not right, it might go away on it’s own, but it probably wont. After an hour on his table he’d managed to take my neck from ‘Stiff, but not sore’ to ‘Sore, but not stiff’.
I wasn’t 100% certain that was an improvement.
I went to bed full of trepidation, knowing I needed to swim in the morning. Hannah had looked at the big picture and brought my unload week forward so I didn’t have as far to swim – but I really needed to do more than two lengths.
As I lowered myself into the water the next morning I still wasn’t sure I was going to be ok, but as I stretched out into a loping crawl the relief was immediate – I could roll my shoulders and my body as I needed to and my swimming capability was back.
As I write, there’s been no reaction. So Crack, or Hiccup?
Right now, my money’s on hiccup. But the next couple of weeks are going to be interesting.
Previous: Channel Swim 11: Unload week, or the psychology of swimming