Ok finally some time to breathe! These last 3 days here in Capbreton have been super busy, but pretty amazing at the same time. I have done pretty much the same routine since Monday, with slight modifications each day as I progress. So to jump right into it, I will break down the day!
730am- Nurse enters room to take blood pressure/give pills/wake you up!
730-830- Breakfast. Consisting of yogurts, cereal, bread, jam, orange juice, and a selection of bananas, oranges, apples and kiwis
830-945- Physio. Mostly exercises to work on strengthening my entire left leg. I begin riding the bike for 10 minutes. Then I get into this Anti-Gravity Machine, so cool. So I put on this spandex short that has a huge waist with a zipper. Then I stand in this AG machine, I zip the big shorts to the machine to prevent air from getting in, then it sucks out all of the oxygen down by my legs. So basically all you can see if just my upper body. The idea is too keep good walking mechanics, while not over stressing the joints, so using only 50% of my body weight. Today I used 70% though, so I am progressing! As soon as I get out of the machine, my legs feel so heavy, I have to walk around a while to feel normal again.
Then when my legs don't feel like they are 200lbs each, I do some hamstring exercises, followed by some leg press, glutes and single leg holds. Mostly ranging from 6 sets x 15 reps, or some in static mode
10-11am- I quickly head up to my room to put on my bathrobe and grab my towel before heading down to the pool. Once I have showered, I get in right away and start doing lengths, being careful not to put too much torque on my knee while swimming. The first day I almost puked after 8 full lengths of the pool in my front crawl mode! I think that last time I did this type of swimming I was working towards my orange badge at Kennedy High School's swimming lessons. Oh how my mother was so proud (too bad I failed the red badge because I couldn't dive).
After the lengths and catching my breath, I spend 10 minutes on the under water stationary bike, so cool! And another 10 minutes on this other under water stepper/stair master sort of thing. Then it's half time and I switch pools, going from the cold one (not too cold) to the hot one (fairly hot). In the hot pool, I have 5 laps to do against the current, with all these jets that are just forcing water in the opposite direction. It reminds me of the days living on Alsace with our family's above ground pool, when all the kids would start swimming in a circle, all in the same direction to get the water flowing that way, then all of the sudden we would stop and try to swim the opposite way against he current. Ya, it is like that :)
11-12pm- Working in the gym with the personal trainer. This is pretty fun here, I get to work upper body with strength training and core as well. Very important part of the day because when I leave here I want to be ready to play and having this hour each day ensures I will stay in top shape! Since I wont be doing bike sprints until next week, they have me doing the hand sprints. It is like a bike except you pedal with your arms. So I have a heart rate monitor strapped on to my chest and there I go, same idea as the stationary bike but with your arms. A bit more tiring though I think. Other than that, we are working on speed and power, since the season is starting and I did the strength training all summer to work up to this point.
12-130pm- LUNCH- so so so good. Since we are all high performance athletes here, and having a dietitian on staff, we are provided with some amazing/well balanced meals! Each day for lunch and dinner, we have the choice of Fish or Meat. I even had duck the other day! We start off with some sort of salad. Tonight we have Soja, Tomato, Avocado, Sesame, Vinaigrette Basilic Salad to start, followed by some fish in a curry sauce and Fromage Blanc with raspberry sauce. Pretty excited, and also very hungry after that detailed explanation.
2-230pm- Back to physio, complete another round of some of the exercises before heading upstairs for some electrodes.
230-3pm- Compex. Here, I sit in a room full of other athletes. It is exactly like a classroom at school, not even kidding, we sit in the same desks. There is a "teacher" or electrode technician would gets us set up for the half hour and we all sit quietly with this machine goes to work on our muscles. The only difference from school is that there is a TV that plays Rugby or Soccer matches. So we just blast our muscles, trying to get everything firing properly again.
3pm-5pm- Back to physio, here I do another round of the exercises, a bit more treadmill work, where I am currently only doing a fast walking pace. It is pretty cool though, as they have two treadmills facing each other and a mirror placed in the middle that shows only your legs. So if someone is facing you on the other treadmill, you can see their upper body, but it looks like they have your legs because of the image in the mirror. Did not work so well with the 6'8 African French basketball player though.
Today I progressed to the Biodex Machine. This is the one that is hooked up to a computer, that measures your strength and power output, while you provide the resistance in both the concentric and eccentric phases of the leg extension. Though I do not have full range in this yet, it was a good sign that I could do it, as I was not able to do it on Saturday when we last tried it.
Then to finish off, I was allowed to bring my hockey stick down and work on my stick handling while in a single leg hold position. Yesterday I did this exercise with a partner, as we tossed a ball back and forth while holding on a single leg, so I asked if I could do the same exercise, except with stickhandling my "Swedish Stickhandling Ball." So dripping with sweat, I ended the day of work with that. What a day!
5pm- Snack time! We have a choice of fresh fruit (bananas, apples, oranges, kiwis) and yogurt!
7pm- Dinner time! See above for detailed description of tonight menu
Also I forgot to mention, I am constantly icing my knee during the day, this is just to avoid any swelling. Though I am staying in my limits and not working through any knee pain, the workload itself could affect it. So they encourage us to ice about 4-5 times per day.
On another note, my team back in Epinal battled hard last night and pulled out a win on the road in Dijon 4-3 in the first game of Coupe de la Ligue. Keep it up boys! I will be back to help as soon as I can!
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