After my cortisone injection yesterday morning, my knee felt better almost immediately.  I think the combination of getting the excess fluid out of the joint, and the anti-inflammatory effect of the steroid made things a lot better.  There is still a lot of instability in the joint.  I have a vicious clicking if I fully flex and although the pain is much reduced, I still notice that my joint has two modes of operation; good and not so good.

Needless to say, I want to avoid the not so good mode of operation.  And as far as I can tell that is done by avoiding  fully flexing my knee.

Yesterday evening, I went and had an MRI done of the joint.  That was a new experience for me.  The imaging center (Metrowest MRI) was prompt, professional and friendly. They did 4 image sequences.  Each took about 4 to 5 minutes, during which I was instructed to keep my knee perfectly still while the machine banged and buzzed.  I looked at the pictures, which were very clear, but I don’t know enough about knees to figure out if there is anything good or bad going on.

This morning, I was pain free and so I headed off to workout in the morning.

The Plan:

• 20 minute warmup on the stationary bike
• If I was pain free, try some erging
  • 1k at 2:00
  • 1k at 1:55
  • 1k as hard as I could tolerate for the CTC
• Strength training

Here is heart rate data for the bike warmup and the 3 intervals on the erg

Here’s the details on the erg stuff.  I was concerned about bending my knee too far so I put a bandaid on the rail at a point before my knee would click.  This provided enough of a bump when the seat rollers hit it that I was reminded to keep my strokes shorter.  Over the intervals, I was able to modify my recovery timing so that I would be fully rocked over before I hit the bump.  This enabled me to get a bit longer drive.  On the last interval, I pushed past the bandaid with no significant pain.  That was heartening.

I was interested in looking at my drive length.

So, for the first interval, I was pulling about a 1.3m stroke.  For the second, around 1.35m.  For the final interval, it was about 1.4m.   Compare that to the 8x750m workout that I did last week.

For this workout, I was maintaining over 1.4m for all but the last interval.  It looks like I had gone back to just about my full stroke in the final rep.

A couple of other interesting plots.

The left shows the peak and average force.  This shows a very consistent increase in both peak and average.  The right is the drive time.  You can see that the drive time was slowing down as my drive length increased.  I was surprised by this since the pace on the last rep was much faster.

After that, I went and changed my shirt and did a few strength exercises

Chin ups
unassisted x5
red band assist 3 sets of 4 reps

standing dumbell press
2×25 10
2×30 2 sets of 10 reps

Bent over barbell rows
45 x 10
95 x 10 x 3 sets

dumbell bench press
2×30 x 10
2×35 x 10 x 2

Tomorrow:  Slow HM (limit compression)