Managing a puzzling injury

This week hasn't gone the way I'd hoped it would.  The plan was to get a couple of good hard workouts in before spending most of next week out of the boat, but this nagging chest-muscle ailment has slowed me down.

Tuesday's weather was positively miserable--overcast, windy, high temperature around 38 degrees Fahrenheit.  Rather than do our usual loop of the harbor, Joe and I did two loops of the northern half of the harbor.  Our local real estate development industry and its flunkies in city and county government have yet to clear-cut the harbor's banks up in the northern half, so there's quite a bit more protection from the wind up there.  Even so, I was chilled to the core by the time we were finished paddling, and spent the rest of the day recovering some body heat.

I wasn't sure whether a chest-muscle strain was something my chiropractor could treat, but my buddy Rob, a chiropractor in New York State, assured me she could.  So I booked an appointment for Wednesday morning, after which I planned to go back to the river and do some kind of medium-intensity workout.  But my chiropractor, after making a few little adjustments that targeted the inflamed area, urged me to avoid activities that require torso rotation (read: paddling) for 48 hours.  So I came back home.  I didn't paddle yesterday either, though I did do a round of the strength routine minus the military press, which I suspect puts stress on muscles like the one that's hurting right now.

By this morning it had been eight days since I'd done a workout in the boat of any substance.  I went back to the river determined to do some kind of higher-intensity effort to see how my sore muscle would respond.  After warming up for ten minutes I did a set of three 8-stroke sprints.  They weren't as hard on the muscle as the Paddle Power drill, but I could still feel some stress.

For my main workout I decided to do four 5-minute tempo pieces during which I aimed to build the pace from 6.5 miles per hour to 7.0 mph.  I took five minutes for recovery in between.  It was not at all an ideal workout for the kind of paddling I'll be doing in South Africa in February, but right now I'm afraid to put any more stress on my injury than that.  The workout went reasonably well, though I was feeling some increased soreness in my muscle by the end of it.  By this evening it's settled back down to about the way it was before I paddled today.

This whole business is all very frustrating, but I'm trying not to let it upset me.  I plan to keep living my life and training in whatever way I can, and hope it'll be enough.


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