So, its been a while...
From that you can extrapolate that the injury situation played out closer to the "worst case scenario" side of things. It turns out that I did manage to give myself a mild stress fracture of the R femoral neck, another one of those obscure injuries only seen in elite athletes and the extremely extremely stupid/unlucky. I'll let you guess which bucket I'm in. Anyways, welcome to "you may never run again... " take two.
I've generally found motivation to be much lower than last year. Last year I was extremely motivated to keep up my fitness and pursue a super conservative transition plan to running... but since that lead to... this... well, let's just say I'm feeling a little bit more on the "fuck this" sort of mindset. Nevertheless, the worst of it has all come and gone (fingers crossed) so I'll report on what's been going on:
May: Hmmmm... a whole lot of nothing. Really, literally... lots of sitting around, eating, fattening and disgruntle-ating. I tried to use crutches for a while, but gave up because it was so painful, I don't really know how I endured this for 6 weeks last year. Instead, I tried to stand on my left foot a lot, and avoid walking places. The rate of healing slowed a lot after I got back from Japan. I blame stress, sleep deprivation and unhappiness. Oh yeah, there was a heck of a lot of insomnia in there too. I wasn't built for the sedentary lifestyle.
June: Some PT, half hearted attempts at exercise. I learned from the PT that I run leaning too far back so that my center of mass is braking into every step... I guess its sorta nice to know that my slowness AND stress fractures are being caused by the same basic problem... but on the down side, the 3 minutes of running on the treadmill to ascertain this fact made my hip hurt :-/. Tried to do some light biking and swimming a couple of times a week but mostly failing. Discouraged by residual aches and pains.
July: More of the same, but started to get serious about swimming every day about halfway through July. Swam after work at the Caltech pool, something between 40 -60 minutes, maybe 5-6 days a week. Hard to get out of work early enough to make it to the pool by 6 pm (get kicked out at 7 pm). Started with 15 x 100 yards, on 2:30 cycles. Felt pretty crappy. Tried to incorporate some drills from Peter, with limited success.
August: Just as I was losing focus on this swimming thing, got opportunely "adopted" by the Caltech Masters swim club and their awesome coaches. Organized workouts make all of the difference. Practice is Mon-Thurs 7 - 8:30 pm and Sat 7 - 8:30 am. At first the 90 minute blocks were a stretch for me, so I only went a few times a week, but gradually committed to going every available day, and swimming easy on my own for 40 minutes on the off days. Also started adding in some cycling on the weekends, at first just long-ish commuting rides to/from errands, maybe 15-20 miles total. Did a few "real"-ish rides, including 7 laps of the RB at 10:10 - 10:25 per lap, which is actually a decent pace.
Started my running recovery regimen too, starting with 1 lap of the south field. Had some inordinate trouble with my calves in the pool which made things go a little bit more slowly than I'd like, but plugging along. Also got sick somewhere in there. Implemented weight loss plan super extreme to ease the transition to running. I was 107 immediately before the hip injury and back up to 120+ within a few months of immobility. Battled it back down to 110, which means that I think I'm in relatively good shape to ambulate in a manner that does not resemble the Michelin Man. Awesome!
