Regaining speed and trying not to care

Let’s recap last week’s ups and downs while recovering from knee replacement surgery (12 weeks ago).

I began last week declaring that I was back to training again and not just doing physio. Life could be about more than range of movement and balance. What this means is that I started riding in Zwift again, watching my avatar and the related metrics, not just watching My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or Never Have I Ever. But then I managed to hurt another muscle. See Sam discovers another weird and painful muscle .

So I spent part of the week back on crutches and back to all the physio. Bah.

But that setback didn’t last long and now I’m riding again in Zwift actually watching the screen, which means that I can see I’m gradually getting faster.

Here’s my time on the Fuego Flats spring three times since surgery:

But just as it’s nice to see I’m getting faster, I’m nowhere near as fast as I was. That’s to be expected but I am trying not to care! I’ve ridden that particular sprint segment 171 times and my fastest time was 41 seconds.

The fastest time ever for a woman is 27 seconds. My fastest time puts me in the 16,479th spot of the 127,073 women who’ve ridden it.

I’m trying to take pleasure in getting faster in my recovery from surgery while not caring too much about not being as fast as I used to be and not being as fast as some of the women out there Zwifting,

Wish me luck in the return to bike training and wish me luck finding comparison useful and motivational in some contexts and ignoring comparisons when they’re neither of those things.