Restructuring

I've been struggling with this tailbone injury for over 3 weeks now and starting to lose my nerves! I guess it's already a little better but it's been a real pain in the ass, literally, and I'm quite tired of it. I'm tired of not being able to sit or lie down, tired of not being able to run and tired of trying to come up with new forms of cross training that I could do without pain. Everything involves your butt and there's not much you can do without one. I've been injured before but it's seldom you face an injury that prevents you even from swimming or aqua jogging. Those are the forms of training that you can most often do, even with a stress fracture. But when you hurt your pelvis (coccyx and sacrum included) then the options are rare. It feels really pathetic if you can't even swim!

So my first solution was to get a pull buoy. A what? Don't worry if you don't know. You've just been lucky and you haven't trained swimming. A pull buoy is not really a buoy but a floating foam thing that you hold between your thighs and it helps you to swim while using only your upper body. Swimmers use it to practice their arms whereas non-swimmers using one are most often injured athletes from other sports. Usually a pathetic sight. Well I've surely had some "fun" trying to learn to swim with that. My legs have always out-powered my arms, which means that when I swim or cross country ski my arms just come along and give a rhythm whereas the power comes from my legs. It works fine as long as your legs work but when the legwork stops then the movement seems to disappear. So my first training session wasn't more than five minutes (and I was all shaky after I had given my everything) but I've been able to train it up to whole 20 minutes now. What an achievement!

I have gradually added some other forms of training too, even some gentle running on grass, but nothing is yet painless. First I just wanted to get rid of the pain and didn't worry about all the undone training but after 3 weeks I couldn't help but take a look on my training plan and start to count the weeks. EOC was (and still is) my big goal for the early season and I was happy to notice that I've still got plenty of time to prepare for that if I just can start running in February. But the problem comes in delivering results over a month earlier. POM is announced to be Finland's selection race for EOC (middle, long, relay) but it is right in the beginning of March and I will really need February and March for some hard training. I'm not throwing in the towel yet but I've set myself another big target for April just to build up the base and to get the needed miles done (for the rest of the season). If everything goes well I'm probably still going to run POM but it will hopefully be in the middle of hard preparation phase. Whether I'll rock there or not I've got my big goal for April and I'll be working my ass off to get my ass work again.

"A strong butt is a key to a happy life"