The Sheffield half marathon is at the end of the week (Sunday 27th March)!
My race number, artfully cropped
I think I’m about as ready as I’ll ever be. I’m pretty sure I’ll get around the course, barring incident or injury, but I’m not expecting to set any records. I (already) broke the steering assembly on my racing chair (it’s fine, I’m just waiting for a part), so I’ll be using my day chair. That’s probably safer for everyone concerned anyway, as I haven’t managed to get as much practice in the racing chair as I’d have liked.
This is the chair I will be using
It also makes the logistics easier. I can fit both chairs in the car, but not if I also want to fit my wife in the car. None of the choices are very good: take two cars, have one of us use the train, hire a trailer, hire a van. The van hire option sounded good, but (unsurprisingly) hiring a van with hand controls is not a particularly straightforward process, so my wife would have had to drive both ways.
Training-wise, I feel in decent form. I had the weekend off and my schedule this week is only moderately intensive. I have a slight strain to a tendon from weight training last week and I don’t want to aggravate it. It won’t get in the way of my pushing action anyway, but It’s best to be on the safe side. I’ll be alternating between training with the rolling road:
My rolling road: I call it Roly.
And an actual road, which I assume you don’t need a picture of. The difference is like that between an exercise bike and a real bike. The former is good for building strength and endurance, but it doesn’t really prepare you for real race conditions. Not that I really know what real race conditions are, of course, since this will be my first.
I’ll also make the final decision on whether to use my freewheel attachment or not:
Freewheel attachment
The Freewheel attaches to the footrest, making the chair into a kind of trike. It has several advantages, particularly in dealing with bumps and dodgy cambers, but it also adds a fair bit of weight. I’ll do the same 7-mile course twice this week, once with the Freewheel and once without and make my decision after that. It’s not that I haven’t tried the same a few times before, this is just a final assessment.
My only real concern is that pain can fluctuate wildly with my condition. This doesn’t affect performance directly (in fact, exercise is about the only thing that helps the pain) but it does affect my sleep, which can hit performance a lot. I’ll just have to see what happens, although I’ll drag myself around the course no matter what.
I’ll let you know how the final week of training goes!
People have been amazingly generous so far, but if you feel like donating to an excellent cause, there is still time to do so here. nia, is a women-led, women-only, secular, rights-based registered charity which has been delivering services to women, girls and children who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse, including prostitution, since 1975.
Even in these troubled times, it’s difficult to imagine a more worthwhile or important cause.
I took the new racing wheelchair out for a spin. It was…. moderately successful.
As I suspected, the steering works only at speed, which is going to take some getting used to. I also realised that I have the footrest on wrong (for me) and the steering needs some adjustment.
What I realised most of all, though, is that I’m going to have to practice somewhere with very wide paths and no traffic until I get used to it.
Somewhere like The Tees Barrage, which is close by, has some good, smooth wide paths and which you might remember from such Olympics as 2012. If you want to come and jeer at me (and who doesn’t?) then I’ll probably be there much of the weekend. Probably at the bottom of a hill. Possibly upside down.
As always, take a look at my fundraising page. I’m doing wheelchair half marathons (hopefully three this year, plus sundry 10k events) to raise money for nia, a women-led, women-only, secular, rights-based registered charity which has been delivering services to women, girls and children who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse, including prostitution, since 1975.
Blogging has been a bit thin on the ground, lately. I’ve been busy and my medication has been giving me grief; it makes concentration and writing difficult. More news on that later. But in the meantime, an announcement, as promised:
I’ve signed up for the Sheffield and Leeds half marathons in March and May respectively. I’ll be putting up a fundraiser page in the next few days, in aid of charities combating violence to women and girls.
So next year I’m committed to:
Sheffield half marathon
Leeds half marathon
Middlesbrough 10k
and, hopefully, the Great North Run (I’ll find out about that in the next few weeks).
I’m going to be busy. And, with any luck, you’re all going to be a little bit poorer. Because, you know, you’ll sponsor me.
I have about a dozen posts in draft on such important topics as medication, training, gloves and zebra crossings. Since I’ve been so poor at posting lately, I’ll commit to at least one post per week, on Wednesday since Wednesdays are already evil. More posts than that will appear if I get my act together.
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 have no updates about progress on my wheelchair order (I might have more news later today) but I’m making some changes to my exercise routine and I ought to write about that. My first attempts ranged from haphazard to potentially lethal, so I know I’m in the right ballpark.
The main issue is that since I can’t use my legs properly, and can’t gain any leverage using my legs, they are difficult to exercise. But exercise is good for them and for the rest of me. It might conceivably help bring back some function in my upper legs. Exercise has certainly increased my stamina and balance. But since I have received no physiotherapy at all due to COVID, I’m having to make it up as I go along.
The short story is that I’m trying to use my weight bench to do squats (or, rather, sissy-squats). It has a seat built in partly for that very purpose. I can’t stand up at all without taking most of my weight on my arms, so the trick is to:
try not to use my arms too much and take as much weight as I can manage on my legs,
keep my back straight and pull with my abs, and
try not to let my arms slip, fall over and kill myself
It was mostly point 3 that caused me difficulty this morning and there was a certain amount of being killed. I need to contrive a wider bar to hold onto, rather than the narrow seat back of the…. squat…thing. The annoying part is that if I could stand properly and use heavy tools in the first place, I could make the equipment I need to exercise because I can’t do those things. I can weld, I can make stuff.. And I have some designs in mind… I know people who have the right tools… We’ll see, I might rope in some friends to help me build something. I’d advise them to stand well clear when I’m tottering around using an angle grinder with one hand, though.
As an encore, I tried to lift a barbell while standing. I can not emphasise enough how bad an idea this was.
For now, I’m going to stick to my under-desk elliptical trainer, which I can manage for short periods of time by using what feels like all the wrong muscles, but which exhausts me very quickly. In the meantime, I’ll try to work out a slightly less lethal way to do squats without dangerously using power tools to build something even the A Team wouldn’t dare to go near.
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.
