Analyzing past workouts helps athletes return from injury

Garmin-sponsored triathlete Ben Collins shares his training and racing experiences with the Garmin Edge 705 and Forerunner 405.

Two weeks ago was the USA Triathlon Elite National Championships, and this year it was held in conjunction with the Age Group National Championships. The course was at Hagg Lake for the second year in a row, and it felt like a home course, having won there last year. Unfortunately, I’ve had a knee injury holding me back from training for a few weeks now, and I wasn’t able to prepare for the race as would have liked. Going into the race, I told myself that if I felt any pain at all, I would drop out. I had a feeling it would take a miracle for me to have a good race, so when I hopped on the bike in T1 and felt a little discomfort in my knee, I told myself it wasn’t worth three more weeks of rehab, and I pulled off to the side.

It’s never easy to pull out of a race, and there are a lot of conflicting emotions that will go through your head if it ever happens. Could I have finished? Why did this happen to me? Could I have stayed with the pack? Will I be able to recover for the next race? And there are no easy answers. Yes, I probably could have finished, but it would not have been a great race. Yes, I will be better for the next race – I hope. Now I just need to reflect on what I did leading up to this injury and work with my coach to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Luckily, I have a great log of exactly what I did on my Garmin Connect account. I have power, HR, pace and cadence for all the out-of-water activity I’ve done, and I can look at what I did before the pain started and pinpoint what may have caused it. This of course does not make up for physical therapy and stretching (which is probably the main thing I did wrong), but it is certainly great information to have.

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