I had two surgeries in the last month, an open mesh inguinal hernia repair on March 3rd and I had a plate installed in my hand to repair a fractured metacarpal that didn’t heal after an earlier surgery. The general surgeon has cleared me to start training again, building up to 100% starting in Week 3. I still have a cast on my hand from the hand surgery which is coming off on Thursday. Once that is off, I am cleared to ride as long as its indoors. I’ve been walking 60 to 90 minutes a day the last week other then the day when I had the hand surgery.
Does this ramp back to 6 hours look reasonable - I have it starting a plan again on the 7th of April:
Only you know your bodies reaction to stimulus. If the plan seems reasonable to you then start there. If you encounter issues then adjust it as needed. I came back slowly once and found after a short period my body could handle more. Another time I pushed to hard and had to back off.
After a semi-major surgery in October, I started with really easy rides, during which my heart rate was about 20 bpm higher than usual, and I was wiped out at the end. I didn’t start ramping up until the easy rides actually felt easy again. After trying a couple more challenging rides and feeling good after, I made a training plan in TR - my FTP had taken a hit, but went up quickly, and now I’m about where I was this time last year. During my recovery I kept telling myself the goal was to recover once, rather than do too much too soon, have setbacks, and end up taking longer to come back.
Today’s workout was easy but the AI saw (HR elevated about 5 bpm) what I saw and lowered my prediction for FTP in two weeks. It had me actually going up 3 watts after I upped the length of next weekend’s workouts to 90 minutes. After today’s ride it dropped down to flat which I would be excited with. My expectation is it’s going to drop another 5 watts over the next 2 weeks.
