This is day 3 or day 4 of the sore back. While the piriformis (I’ve been misspelling it for weeks) is tight on every ride, the bigger issue is the lower back pain that happens around 1hr. I’m taking 3 days off and hoping to fix it again. This will further drop CTL, but it’s already so low that I don’t care anymore. I’d like to get healthy, so I’ll be trying to avoid any hard jumps in Sunday’s Georgia Games crit. Luckily, that is more of a circuit than a crit, so I’ll try to avoid crit type back tiring jumps.
I went back to reread my posts from last year to see if I had any back injuries. I didn’t have any, but I did the prior year in CX. At that time, I started doing the “Foundation” exercises by some Lance Armstrong core strength coach. I’m not a fan of Lance Armstrong, but those seemed to work well two years ago. They worked so well that I pulled a muscle in my chest at the beginning of last year due to some imbalance between the core and chest that I created by doing back inflections all winter. So, my goal now is to focus on back inflections, push-ups, plank, piriformis stretches, and a few quad stretches. Somehow, I’ll try to remember to ride my bike too…. As I keep saying in these posts, getting old doesn’t mean getting slower, it means more injury and an inability to recover which leads to getting slower. If you are religious about keeping a healthy core which I am not, then you will likely stay fast as you age. Some of us obviously only learn the hard way after multiple recurring issues. Someone please punch me in the head if they hear or see me preparing for CX in September. If anyone needs a true offseason this year, it is me!
A Journey Through Training and Racing in the Southeast 
Leave a Reply