It’s been a while coming but welcome to my blog, charting my goals, progress and thoughts towards training, racing and coaching into 2018.
With 2017’s races behind me, a few weeks off and focus shifted towards 2018 – races have been chosen and entered (IM Italy/Norway being the main focus of my season) and maintenance was going well, training plans and nutritional tweaks for the year ahead were being formulated.
Then disaster. 2 months back, whilst leading a guided run, an innocuous misstep lead to me tearing my Popliteus and damaging my meniscus.

For those that haven’t heard of a popliteus before, let me fill you in, it’s a small muscle that helps knee flexion and aids knee stability.
When it is weakened, as you run, your knee feels like it’s about to give way causing your Golgi tendon reflex to kick in before the tendon tension becomes high enough to cause damage – in short not massively painful but infuriating, frustrating and demoralising. You literally cannot run through it.

2 months of enforced rest, no swimming no running and I’m now looking at the possibility of surgery looming over me – this isn’t how I imagined the season to start.

Winter is a difficult time to train as it is. With an injury those difficulties are compounded and you can be left at rock bottom motivation and morale wise. For me it’s been very difficult to focus on training as the slightest tweak and I feel like I’m back to square one whilst the whole time the clock is ticking to get my base training in.

Extensive physio has got me to the point that I got to test run 4km to see how the knee holds up – happy to report that I completed the run with no adverse effects so fingers crossed I’m heading out of a 2-month injury and can look forward to a productive injury free new year.

Coach Paul