I really must get  a proper camera as my phone just doesn’t get nice sharp photos. The picture today is of my aero bar setup on my road bike. I’d put Oval stems on both my road and TT bike so I could use their modula approach to get quite a neat set up. Above you can see I’ve got aero bars without losing any of the nice hand positions on my road bars. I’ve used pipe lagging wrapped in bar tape for arm rests directly on the bar. These are super comfortable when riding sat up with hands on the bars as it gives a nice big padded grip for my large hands. It’s also AOK when down and aero. One of the reasons it’s so comfy when riding aero is that the elbow pads are more or less the exact same height as the end of the aero bars. I’m very tempted to try this out on my TT bike but unfortunately despite my choosing oval on both bikes allow easy switching of setup I went and got standard bars on one and oversize on the other. A real over sight on my part. Can’t decide whether to just switch the TT to oversize and sell the bars, stem and faceplate… This lack of consistency really niggles me.

On to the title of the post. Unfortunately I’ve had my first set back. I’m not running again. This was to be expected trying to rehab from such an injury but despite expecting something like this it’s gutting when it happens. I’ve got suspected capsulitis of the 3rd metatarso phalyngeal joints. Funny how getting an injury improves your medical vocabulary. This is inflammation of the joint between my middle toe and the metatarsal bone. It means I feel discomfort as I push off walking and running. It’s probably brought about by trying to avoid pushing off with my big toe. I can tell I’m doing this because when i put my foot on the floor I’m automatically trying to hold the big toe off the ground.

Last week I didn’t do any biking or running for a couple of days to let it die down. No running for a further day but when i tried running after that it was not great at all. So for now I’m not running at all. It’s settling down but is not better. The good thing is that cycling doesn’t seem to present a problem. I’m getting referred back to my consultant so he can take a look. The chances are I will need to work with a podiatrist to get my gait correct again before I start running.

With only 12 weeks to Kona I am adjusting my thoughts for this season. I will view anything I achieve as a bonus but the real target has to be next year. The important thing is not to apply any pressure to rehab this too quickly. It needs to get fixed properly.