That’s extra disappointment that’s mild, not disappointment that’s extra-mild. But that comes later.
I’ve had to ease off on training for a few days because of my new medication. I’ve moved from Gabapentin to the more modern and designed-for-purpose nerve blocker Pregabalin. I’m having to start on a small dose and work up so that side-effects can be controlled. This will take some weeks and in the meantime the pain is not being blocked. It is persistent and very, very severe.
But it’s the side-effects rather than the pain that have been preventing serious training. I won’t go into details (unless anyone is genuinely interested for medical reasons) but exhaustion has been a key factor. Those days are over, for the time being, and I put in a very respectable hour of training this morning.
The disappointment is that my Wear OS watch hasn’t been as useful as I had hoped. This is no real fault of the watch: it measures my various functions with what seems like reasonable accuracy and graphs it all nicely. I wrote a little metronome app which pulses the watch to train me to keep to a particular time with my pushes.
All of that worked fine… but I’ve found that the main factor in my performance is how tired I am. When I’m sleeping well (for me), I can see my performance steadily improving (speed and endurance) and when I don’t sleep well, the decline is dramatic. Nothing else really seems to have a noticeable effect. So I’m not sure the watch is really helping.
This is disappointing; I’d hoped that the watch would help me improve my performance. I might have to see if I can find some better software.
Two other complaints: most decent wheelchair gloves have a strap around the wrist that helps with durability. This means that I have to wear the watch halfway up my wrist. Second, while the watch’s workout software has a wheelchair option which works pretty well to map distance and route when I’m out and about, it doesn’t do a good job of measuring virtual distance on the rolling road.
There was an option, when I bought the rolling road, to include some extra measuring stuff and an app. But ooooooh noooooo, I knew better and told them no, my watch had it covered. This might have been a mistake and I might have to go crawling back for the extra stuff.
I should start by saying that I don’t really know what I’m talking about. In my youth, back before the old king died, I was very fit. I did a lot of martial arts training, played badminton every day for years, ran about five miles almost every day and walked everywhere else. Injury and life rather got in the way of this and it was really only last year, at age 48, that I decided to start exercising regularly again. It was only this year, approaching 49, that I decided to train seriously.
Between those two dates, I lost around 7 stones in weight, but I also lost the use of my legs, so you will understand that my exercise regime has changed greatly. Even back in my youth, I had no formal training in fitness, no training in losing weight or graining stamina. I relied on my whippersnapperhood and on gradually pushing myself harder when whatever I was doing began to feel easy.
With age and infirmity, I feel I have to be a little more precise in my measurements. I’ll explain my thinking more fully as it develops, but for now, here’s the routine I’ve settled into for the time being.
Rolling road
Rollo is the key here. The rolling road means that I can train consistently and in all weathers. Of course, rolling on Rollo is different to rolling on real terrain. There’s no camber, for one thing. No potholes or broken glass to avoid (I feel like I might be painting an inaccurate picture of where I live, but it’s lovely here, honest.) There’s no wind resistance or hills. But the idea of Rollo is like that of a treadmill: to perfect technique and build stamina. I also train in the outdoors, but less consistently than I should. More on this in a later post.
Every day I do four runs of 35 minutes each consisting of repeated sets of:
400 normal strokes
400 strokes of alternate wheels, one at a time, at a faster rate than the above
Finished with five minutes of backward strokes. I’m told this is important because shoulder injuries can occur if you don’t develop those muscles too. Wheeling a chair is not really a very natural action for a human so it’s important to avoid causing undue stress on muscles and bones.
At the moment I’m not accurately measuring the frequency of the strokes; I’m just pushing as hard and fast as I can manage and counting to maintain a rough sort of frequency. I’m measuring (using my watch) the overall number of strokes per session, aiming to keep them roughly consistent. I’m also monitoring my heart rate, which I’m trying to keep in the stamina-building zone. None of this is very scientific and I’m working on ways to improve that. I need better ways to tell whether I’m improving. One improvement I’m thinking about is a metronome app for my watch to keep my strokes consistent. If there isn’t one, I’ll probably write one. In my imagination, this would make the watch pulse once per stroke for a set number of strokes until I’ve got the rhythm, then pulse once per, say, ten strokes so I can learn to keep the rhythm without constant reenforcement. And without killing my watch battery when I’m barely out of the starting blocks.
I’m also trying to keep an eye on technique. Correct technique requires sitting fully upright (or backward) in the chair and using long strokes from as far back on the wheel as possible. When I do this, I can feel it in my chest as well as my arms and that’s how I know (as far as I know) that I’m doing it right. I have a tendency to lean forward, especially when I’m getting tired, and I need to kill that habit.
There’s lots more to say about training, especially in the outdoors and with weights. I’ll say those things in future posts.
This post is about wheelchairs, my first (and current) wheelchair in particular. I’ll write another post about other types of equipment you might need.
When I first started to rely on a wheelchair, there was nobody to give me advice. In fact, I hired a wheelchair to get to a hospital appointment because I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle the endless corridors. The consultant was surprised and asked where I’d got the chair. Naively, I thought he was surprised that I needed a chair at all and thought it bode well for his taking my condition seriously.
I now realise that he was surprised because the chair hadn’t been issued by the hospital. I’ve had a similar reaction from every consultant I’ve seen since; I should have been assessed and, since I obviously need a wheelchair, I should at the very least have been given advice about where to get one, what type to get and what funding might be available to help me.
I didn’t. But I forgive the NHS for this since it all happened at the height of the first COVID lockdown and the NHS was chaotic and fragmented. It meant, though, that I was on my own when it came to buying a wheelchair and I had no idea what I was doing. One of the reasons I started this blog was to document what I’ve learned, so this is what I learned about buying my first wheelchair.
It’s important to note that I’m still very new at this and I still have a lot to learn.
My first wheelchair
This is what I bought. It’s described as “Excel G-Explorer All Terrain, Lightweight, Folding, Manual Self Propelled Aluminium Wheelchair”, although it’s also available under other brands and names. It cost about £350. The first order of business was to take off the crappy orange panels. You might have different priorities. I also cut off the seatbelt because it was annoying.
The Excel G-Explorer is a perfectly fine wheelchair as far as I know. I haven’t tried any others in anger since I was eight. It meets my daily needs adequately and I doubt £350 would have bought me a significantly better chair. It comes with the off-road wheels pictured. My first piece of advice if you want to be active in your chair is to get both off-road and regular wheels. The off-road ones are great on mud, grass and (light) gravel and the tyres are difficult to puncture (needless to say, I managed it anyway) but they’re heavy and generate a lot of friction. When I bought a set of regular wheels, I wasn’t quite prepared for how much of a difference they’d make on floors and pavements. Get both, if you can afford it. I now use the regular wheels all the time, unless I’m likely to be on rough ground. Badass though the off-road wheels undoubtedly look, you’re going to need regular wheels too. And – at the time of writing – they are not easy to get.
This is actually an important point: manual wheelchair wheels are quick release and can be swapped over easily by anyone sufficiently able-bodied. But there are some issues to watch out for when you’re buying wheels that are far from obvious. I’ll be posting about this soon.
The things I complain most about are the footrests. They are flimsy, plastic things. They haven’t failed yet, but it seems only a matter of time.They’re also huge and they’re annoying and they’re constantly in the way, but that’s more to do with the design of this kind of footrest in general than with these particular ones. Better chairs have better footrests and I’ll discuss that in another post. I’m just saying that however good your imagination, you probably can’t imagine how annoying crappy footrests are.
Back support is… meagre. It’s a folding chair so the back is made of fabric like a director’s chair, stretched between two supports. This is fine when I’m out and about, but I spend a lot of time in the chair and while I use an additional back cushion for support, it’s not really adequate. If you’re going to spend considerable amounts of time in your chair, I suggest looking at something more expensive. Back support is one of my motivations (because “motivations” sounds nobler than “justifications”) for buying a better chair.
One further point is that this chair requires quite a lot of (very minor) maintenance. The bolts that hold on various non-vital parts such as the footrest straps and the catches that release the spars that hold the footrests are prone to working loose, falling off and getting lost. Yes, the footrests managed to find yet another way to confusticate me. Keeping the bolts tight is a trivial matter for me because I have enough mobility in my body and fingers, but others might find it difficult. Either way, buy some spare bolts because you’re likely to need them.
Apart from those issues, the chair is fine for daily use. I’d go so far as to recommend it, since it hasn’t let me down yet. But I don’t think it will stand up much longer to the grief I’m putting it through and I don’t think it’s suitable for half marathon distances. Here’s why.
My training regime involves a minimum of two hours full tilt on Rollo, my rolling road, in addition to any other exercise or activity I do that day. If I exercise outdoors, I do between three and a half and four and a half miles, depending on what route I take. The rolling road is more strenuous because I can work faster, but the outdoors is more demanding in other ways because of the poor condition of the pavement and especially the camber. The camber alone is worth another post, which I’ll do soon.
This is causing wear and tear because the chair is a regular folding one. It isn’t designed for the stress I’m putting it through. When I’m going flat out on the rolling road, I can feel it start to warp a little, especially when I’m working each wheel alternately.
Due to all this stress, one of the wheels has developed an annoying creak. I’ve traced this to the axle mounting: a slight warp – or perhaps some imperfect engineering – has caused a small misalignment of the axle with the mounting, so when the wheel spins, the retractable pins on the chair side that hold the axle in place are rubbing against the axle mounting, causing the creak. I know this isn’t very clear, but the specifics don’t matter: suffice to say, the stress of significant training is slowly damaging the chair. I expect the damage to be cumulative, so I need anew chair that’s built to handle that kind of punishment.
Besides, I’m sitting in this chair most of the day, when I’m working as well as when I’m exercising, socialising and often when I’m relaxing. I need something that’s more comfortable, better for my back, better able to take the stress of training and that looks cooler and more badass.
Next: what I’ve learned about buying a better wheelchair.
I’m very tired today. And hurty. And I’m having a lot of painful muscle spasms in my legs. This is fairly normal for me, though, and I have to work through it. My starting regimen for training is… not very regimented. I’m doing two hours per day going as fast as I can on my rolling road, in sets of half an hour, on top of any other exercise I do.
This is a lot of exercise, but I’ve no idea whether it’s the right sort or intensity of exercise. I’m not measuring anything useful and I don’t know what I ought to be measuring anyway.
So that’s my training for today; two hours on the rolling road and then figuring out what I ought to be measuring and what my watch is able to measure.
I’m training for a wheelchair half marathon. If I can pull that off, I’ll go on to do more, and hopefully to do some full marathons. The point of this is to raise some money for charities that support women and girls who have suffered violence and abuse. The thing is, I’m new to all this. I’m new to disability, to being a wheelchair user and to distance wheelchairing (we need a better word for that. “Distance rolling” is presumably a different thing altogether, although it sounds like a great spectator sport). I’m new to fundraising in this day and age (we just used to go round with a piece of paper asking people to write down how much money they promised to give us if we did The Thing. Now it all seems more complicated.) And while I’m not new to serious training (I ran, did a lot of martial arts and played badminton fairly seriously), that was back before the old king died. I’m only just starting to get fit again.
So this is a blog about learning to do all those things. I need to learn what equipment I need, what training regimen I should follow, what times I can expect to achieve and, most importantly, I need to learn about raising money. I also need to know more about the charities and people I’m raising money for, so I can better help them. I need to learn what else I need to learn.
I’m assuming there might be others in the same boat; mid-life crisis people like me who want to get into distance… err…. wheeling(?) but don’t have fancy racing wheelchairs or belong to any wheelchair racing clubs. And people who want to raise money in this sporadic fashion. People like me who don’t really know where to begin. This blog is for those people. And for people who want to find out more about the violence and abuse that women face every single day in every country there is. People who want to find out what we can do about it.
So to begin, here is my extensive range of wheelchair marathon equipment.
This is my wheelchair. It was cheap. When I bought it, I wasn’t certain that I’d be in a chair forever, so I didn’t over-spend. In the future I might invest in a better chair, but I don’t even know what to look for or what constitutes ‘better’. I have the off-road wheels shown here and some nice, thin racing wheels (I won’t bore you with details of the tyres, even I’m not that obsessive.) There are some things I’d like to change. For example, the footrests are a constant annoyance and they and the front castors do not look sufficiently badass for my purposes. I might change those. I might get pushrims that are more grippy and a better shape. If I get really into distance…. pushing(?) I might even get a fancy racing chair. They look bloody uncomfortable, though, and how you get in and out of them is a complete mystery. They are also very expensive, so I’d have to get really, really, into endurance wheelchairing to justify that.
This is my rolling road. I call it Rollo, after the only king I will ever serve. I bought it from Invictus Active, who make them and sell other wheelchair stuff. This was not cheap, but it’s a good, well-engineered piece of kit and it means I can train indoors. I don’t have to explain how the thing works, it’s fairly self-explanatory, but I’ll write a lot here about the cons, pros and practicalities of using it every day. There’s lots of video about Rollo on the Invictus Active site if you’re curious.
These are my gloves. Actually, I have lots of different pairs of gloves and I’m not entirely happy with any of them. Either I tear then to shreds in no time or they strip the skin clean off that bit between the thumb and finger where it really bloody hurts. They also tend to get in the way of my watch, which is busy trying to measure my pulse. These ones are climbing gloves and are as sturdy as any I’ve come across, but not perfect. I’m always on the lookout for better ones.
And that’s it. That’s my kit. I expect it will change as I learn more. And if you have any suggestions, I’d really like to hear them.
