Part 7: The wheels start turning.
It took a few days to work up the courage to try. But finally got back on the trainer this morning, after figuring out how to get my knicks and jersey on without crying out in agony. In the end I spun for all of 22 minutes and covered a whopping 8km. And yeah, it hurt. In fact, it was actually quite hard to get on the bloody thing at first, as I can’t put any weight on my left arm. In the end I tried mounting the bike from the other side to normal and that seemed to work a whole lot better.
The other thing I quickly found was I can’t reach down to hold the bars with my left arm just yet, so spent most of the time sitting bolt upright. Not great, but far better than nothing. It was certainly good to work up a sweat again. It’s been a while. Somewhat depressingly, if not entirely surprisingly, my average heart rate for today’s decidedly modest effort was 150bpm, with several periods over 163bmp. To put this in its sad perspective I was at threshold HR whilst riding at barely 23km/h. Sigh.
Having confirmed what I already knew – I am bloody unfit – it’s going to take quite a chunk of time to get even close to where I was at the back end of last year. If I can be back on the road by March(ish) and racing by mid-year without being dropped that will be a fair result I reckon. The good news is my physio, who is also chief motivator and the closest thing I have to a coach, seems well up for the challenge of getting me back in shape and the trainer is going to be an important of it. Be interesting to see how it all pans out.
Changing the subject slightly, on doctor’s orders I’m continuing to do my mini exercises every couple of hours to try and get more motion back into the shoulder, and also spending a couple of hours each day out of the sling at home. Not sure if the pain from doing these things is subsiding or I’m just getting used to it, but I’ve managed to use fewer painkillers over the past two days which I’m quite happy about. Still plenty of ice, of course.
Oh, and while this may make you laugh, there was cause for enormous celebration this morning. I managed to do up the button on my shorts using both hands for the first time in 6 weeks. Yeah, baby!
Days since op: 25
Days since crash: 41
Shirt removal pain-o-meter: 3/10
Carbon Addiction 
Jesus Pete, I haven’t read your blog in a while but came looking for your Zoo2Zoo writeup (having just signed up) and found this! Hope the recovery goes well. Baby steps.