Too much too soon

How I got there

I joined a run club in September 2025 (my girlfriend joined first, I tagged along) and I was quickly one of the faster people there, which went to my head about as fast as you'd expect. I was on Runna, following the workouts religiously, hitting every speed target. At some point it started predicting a 16:00 5K for me. I went out and did a solo time trial and ran 17:45, and I took that as the prediction being early rather than the prediction being wrong.

So I went into the settings and overrode the mileage, set it to Elite Plus or whatever the top tier is called, because I felt strong and the app seemed to think I could. Best sessions of my life for about three weeks, and then at the end of November right after the fastest 400m repeats I've ever run, my knee went. I felt so strong, and then bam, it all came crashing down, a month out from the Rose Bowl Half. I don't think the 400s did it exactly, it's more that the injury signal finally hit at my highest of highs.

The panic, which nobody writes down

Then cue all the stages of grief, bargaining, despair, etc. It really does show up in roughly the documented order, which I did not expect. I bargained. I catastrophized about a race I'd built half my autumn around. Mostly though I just had this constant feeling of fitness draining out of me every day I sat still, which as far as I can tell is both the most common feeling in endurance sport and one of the most wrong.

I'm a gear head so I went where gear heads go, which is Amazon. Fifty dollar under-desk bike, and I started cranking out the saddest aerobic workouts of my life, which was ridiculous and also worked, mostly because it was right there and I would actually do it rather than plan to do it.

I kept testing the knee and improvement was frustratingly slow. The IC3 I found on eBay for $200 and picked up on no notice, days before we flew home for Christmas, because I needed a real bike to get some real long zone 2 in. My butt hurt immediately but I felt back in the driver's seat for the first time in over a week, which was worth a lot more than two hundred bucks. Oh and I ordered a second tiny under-desk one for my parents' place, which tells you where my head was at.

What the engine does while you're hurt

Your aerobic base is the slowest thing you've got to build and among the slowest to lose, so what drops off quickly is the tissue-specific stuff - tendon stiffness, running economy, neuromuscular sharpness - and none of that is what you're lying awake about at 2am. You're lying awake about the engine, and the engine is basically fine.

That 1:24:31 doesn't mean cycling replaces running though, and I'd rather say so than let you take the wrong thing from it - what it means is that the engine survived, and the parts that hadn't been trained showed up exactly where you'd expect them to, which we'll get to.

The race

I started running again about a week and a half before the half, and my longest run going in was 7 miles, two days out (not recommended, obviously). We just went for it anyway. I came through the early miles at 6:10 to 6:20 pace and dropped into the sub-6:10s for a few segments feeling amazing, and then by mile 5 the adrenaline wore off and I started questioning some life choices.

There was a group just ahead, the lead woman and her two pacers, and I clung onto them and they dragged me all the way to mile 8, and then it got pretty bad. I locked in for five more glorious miles in a real pain cave and they dropped me at eleven. Coming into the last mile, curving round the golf course, both my calves cramped, ripples through both of them at once, and I had to walk.

I let myself feel this peaceful defeat for about ten seconds and then noticed the volunteers looking at me with enormous pity, so I slapped my calves (mostly to demonstrate why I was walking, it's not because I gave up okay) and shuffled, then jogged, then got back into an actual run. That mile took 7:30 and the other twelve were quick enough to carry it. Eleven days of running probably just wasn't enough for my legs to hold together for thirteen miles, which in hindsight seems fairly obvious.

Four things that actually held up

And then I did it again

After the Rose Bowl my knee was toast again, so cycling stopped being rehab and started being the sport. Zwift ramp tests, Zwift races, chasing 4 W/kg, and eventually a road bike.

On my third ever outdoor ride a buddy invited me along. I'm crushing the hills, I'm light, I'm strong. It ends up being almost two hours I think. On the way home we're on Santa Monica Blvd and on a whim I decide to signal with my right hand for the first time in my life while braking. Next thing I know I'm bouncing off the pavement.

I rode home totally fine. Then my wrist swelled up like crazy and I was the last person urgent care let in that night. Small triquetrum avulsion fracture which is basically the best way to break your wrist if you're planning on it. Still, this was my third outdoor ride ever.

Same mistake I made with running, just a different version of it. The fitness had run way out ahead of the skill, which is sort of the bike-handling version of an engine outrunning its tendons. That kept being a theme once I started doing group rides too. Fast uphill, but a menace in a group, twitchy, and completely capable of putting 900 watts into a corner for no reason and riding into a canyon wall.

What I would tell my past self

New things are exciting, especially when you take to them quickly. You'll have your whole life to keep riding or running, give that little extra time at the start.

Anyway I MacGyvered an elbow rest onto the Zwift setup and kept riding with the splint on. Coworkers asked whether I'd considered just not riding for a bit. No. Never once. Do as I say, not as I do.