Recent Updates

The last couple of weeks have been pretty busy as I have been doing a short block of races for my final tune up before the UK Championships and World Championship Selection Trials in Birmingham on July 29^th – 31^st. My first race was the Birmingham Diamond League, where I competed in the 100m. This was a really high profile race, and I was ranked eight (i.e. last) fastest in my heat, so I knew I was up against it. I love competing in those situations though, where you know you have to run to the best of your ability. I think I did that, running an equal seasons best of 10.23, despite the rain, and coming sixth in my heat, and tenth overall.

My next race was at the England Championships. I had had a cold for the week prior to this, and woke up on the day feeling pretty rough. I remember considering pulling out before my heat, but figured I would just run and see how it went. I’m glad I did, because I ran a comfortable 10.29, which was a huge confidence booster. I then had another good run in my semi-final, clocking 10.19, just 0.01 seconds off the World Championships A standard, and my fastest time since 2008. It was a bittersweet feeling though, as the clock stopped at 10.18 (the A standard) – I thought I had achieved the standard, only for it to have been rounded up. In the final I ran 10.17 wind assisted for second behind my training partner, Harry Aikines-Aryeety.

I now have a two-week period in order to prepare for the Trials. During this time I will be having my second epidural of the year in order to help reduce some back pain I have been getting, and hopefully getting over this cold!

Craig Pickering’s Tour of Europe – Parts 2 & 3

In my last blog post, I gave a quick run over of my races in Holland and the Czech Republic. The day after I got back from the Czech Republic I had relay practice in London in preparation for a race in Germany that weekend. Relay practice went well, and the next day we flew to Munich, then took a short coach trip to Regensburg, where I would be running the relay for Great Britain. Unfortunately we were disqualified in the race, due to a freak accident involving one of our athletes. As he was running, he accidentally hit the baton against his leg, and dropped it!

As soon as I got back from Germany, I moved house with my girlfriend up to my new training centre in Loughborough. This was a very busy time, with most of my non-training time spent packing and then unpacking.

A couple of weeks later I was off to Stockholm for the European Team Championships as part of the 4x100m relay squad for Great Britain. On the Friday night, we ran in a “B” relay, running 38.72, which ranked us second in Europe this year. It was a useful race for us, as it gave us plenty of confidence to go into the main race the next day and try to win. For me, the main race provided and individual challenge – on my leg was Christophe Lemaitre, who 90 minutes earlier had run 9.95 seconds. I think I ran a good leg, and managed to hold off Lemaitre – and, as a bonus, the team managed to win in a European leading time of 38.60.

My next race will be on July 2^nd, so between now and then I will just be focusing on training (as still unpacking from my house move!). 

Craig Pickering’s Tour of Europe – Part One

Now that the athletics season is properly underway, my annual trips to various parts of Europe has begun. I started off with two races in quick succession – Hengelo (Holland) on May 29^th, and Ostrava (Czech Republic) on May 31^st. Trips in and around Europe often involve lots of travel, and this was no different. To get to Hengelo, I flew to Amsterdam and had a two-hour car journey to Hengelo itself. Getting to Ostrava was much more interesting. I was supposed to fly from Düsseldorf, but, instead (and through no fault of my own) was mistakenly driven to Amsterdam airport by my driver. As it was 7am in the morning when we arrived, and I had been sleeping in the car, it took me a few minutes to realise what had happened. I remember thinking, “Why are the signs in Dutch, and not German?” And then it dawned on me! I had to pay €400 to change my flights to fly from Amsterdam to Prague, have a 6 hour stop-over in Prague airport, and then fly to Ostrava. All in all, I spent 14 hours travelling that day, leaving my first hotel at 5am and arriving in my Ostrava hotel at 7pm.

The races themselves were fairly solid. In Hengelo, I ran 10.23 (+1.1), which is my second fastest legal time since 2008. Unfortunately, I couldn’t back it up in the final, coming last in 10.38. In Ostrava, I was unfortunate to catch a race without a favourable following wind, running 10.31 (-0.2). In hindsight, this was a pretty solid run, as with a +1 wind it could have easily become a 10.24 performance. Ostrava was a very high quality race, won by Usain Bolt in 9.91 seconds. Indeed, six people in the race had run under 10 seconds in their career!

Overall, I am relatively happy with how I am running. I am having some issues relating to a lot of the training I missed due to injury, which are causing me to under-perform slightly. I am probably going to spend 3-4 weeks in June doing some proper training in order to try to rectify these issues, so hopefully come July I will be running a tenth of a second or so faster. Fingers crossed!

Quick Update

After coming back from Italy, I competed at the Loughborough International, where I came 3rd in the 100m in 10.15. Unfortunately for me, this was accompanied by a following wind of +3.5m/s, which is over the allowable limit, and so my time does not count for record or qualification purposes.

I am due to race in Hengelo, Holland this Sunday, and then Ostrava next Tuesday. Hopefully the conditions will be a little more favourable, and I can build on my performance at Loughborough and hopefully run under 10.25 seconds legally, which will be a big step towards the World Championships qualifying standard of 10.18 seconds. I face tough competition though - Usain Bolt will be in Ostrava!

I will keep you posted with my results.

The Next Steps

So now that the spasm was settling down, I was able to start to sit down for controlled periods of time, in order to get some spinal flexion back. I could also progress my rehab on to much more challenging exercises, and for the second and third weeks I was doing up to four hours of these exercises every day. This really wasn’t fun, but I was pretty motivated to achieve my goal of beating the doctor’s timescale of comeback. There were times where I didn’t want to do the rehab (it was insanely boring), but I forced myself to do it.

Exactly two weeks after my injury, I was allowed to do three very slow jogs over 30m. This might not seem like anything, but for me it felt like a huge breakthrough! Week three I was allowed to do some form of gym work, although not much at all. I also started to do slightly more structured running sessions, although no spikes as of yet. I was allowed to do 50% of my reps in spikes 4 weeks post-injury, and again this felt like a big breakthrough. Five weeks post-injury I was able to start doing some runs from a four-point start without blocks. Blocks were the last thing to be added in, coming 8 weeks post-injury. Nine weeks post injury; I competed in my race, running 10.39 seconds. To put this in perspective, it is only 0.01 seconds slower than I ran last year. In addition to this, it was in a very small competition, and I usually run my best times in big competitions when the adrenaline is flowing. So, all in all, I am fairly happy with how things have progressed.

So that is where I am now. I still cant do power cleans or squats, the two mainstays of my lifting programme. Instead, I have had to get creative with how I set up my lifting sessions. I can’t lift any weights off the floor, or take any large loads on my shoulders in order to protect my spine. One day I might be able to do these again, but for now I just have to accept my limitations!

The First Week

The first week post-injury was also fairly difficult. The first couple of days were focused on helping the disc settle down as much as we could. To achieve this, I wasn’t able to flex my spine at all (i.e. no sitting down), and couldn’t do any real exercise. I was able to do some very slight rehabilitation exercises, with the focus being at regaining control of the muscles in and around my core I also managed to get hold of some prescription painkillers which helped it all settle down.

Three days post-injury I went for an MRI scan, and I got the results the next day. The injury was diagnosed as a disc protrusion between the L4 and L5 vertebrae. This was the sight of my existing protrusion – however, it had got significantly worse. I was given a time frame of around 8-10 weeks until I was back to full fitness. Immediately, I formulated a goal to beat that timescale, and to facilitate this goal I entered myself in a competition nine weeks down the line.

The rest of the week was just treatment to get rid of the spasm, and rehabilitation exercises four times per day. Finally, at the end of the week, I had an epidural injection to settle down some of the spasm that myself and the physiotherapists couldn’t get rid of. For those of you that don’t know, an epidural is an injection into the dura that runs alongside the spinal column. It’s certainly an interesting experience, but it did really help settle down the muscle spasm, and I awoke the next day feeling much better.

I - Day

If you follow me on twitter, I am sure you are aware by now that I have suffered some sort of injury, as I have spent most of my time moaning about rehab. Some of you might be wondering what has happened to me; others wondering what I am doing to get better, and some of you might be thinking about how this might affect my training and competition performance. Well, over the course of a series of blogs, I will answer these questions.

Injuries are a part of sport, and a large number of athletes suffer one big injury at least (and hopefully only) once in their career. These injuries are career and possibly life-changing. They alter what you can do on a day-to-day basis both in training and life. I fully believe what happened to me is my “big” injury, so hopefully now that is out of the way. Ready? Here we go:

Background

In 2005, aged 18, I suffered a spinal injury which was diagnosed as a left sided SI joint strain. There was no x-ray or MRI to confirm this, it was just a working analysis. It is highly likely at this point that I also suffered some sort of lower spine disc bulge, but at a very low level. In 2007, I was suffering from intense muscle spasms in my back, which at some points got so bad I couldn’t get my hands to my knees. This was happening mid-season, and so to stop it I had a couple of injections, and had to stop doing blocks, which was a part of my race that needed work – as Imp sure you can believe, this was very frustrating for me. I had two MRIs that year – one before and one after the season. They showed a couple if disc bulges, at a fairly low level. So, due to this, I modified my training slightly, added in a whole host of back and abdominal strength exercises, took good care of my back, and, over time, suffered no symptoms at all. As far as I was concerned, that was the end of my back problems.

Day 0 – Injury

So now we move forward to March 4^th 2011, the first day of the European Indoor Championships, for which I hadn’t been selected. So, I was back into my first week of training, and I was in the gym. I had already done some push-press and hang cleans, and was feeling good. I was doing some deadlifts, at a very light weight of 140kgs, and as I was preparing for the third rep of my set. I locked in my back position, and prepared to begin my pull. As lifted the weight off the floor, I was aware of my back rounding ever so slightly. Straight away, I then had a really weird feeling, like something was moving backwards out of my spine, followed by a strong pain either side of my lower back, which immediately became a shooting pain across the whole of my back. I yelled out a few choice words, dropped the weight, and stood up, and which point my back completely locked up. Every muscle from my hamstring to the top of my ribcage had spasmed, in order to protect my spine. I made my way (slowly) to the physio room, and they set me up with an appointment for later in the day, gave me painkillers, and sent me to get a warm shower. The idea here s that the warm water would help my muscles to relax.

The shower was very hard work. Because my back had spasmed, I couldn’t get my shorts off, and it took me fully 5 minutes of hard work to get my socks off. As I stood in the shower, I was about 75% sure that my career was over, the pain was that bad. Getting out o the shower wasn’t much fun either, as I had to stand still to allow my shorts to dry, and spend another 5 minutes getting my socks back on.

The physio appointment didn’t go much better! This was about 3 hours post-injury now, and there really wasn’t much the physio could do for me. As I got off the physio bed, I then went into shock, because the pain was so bad. That was a weird feeling, as I went dizzy, lost my hearing, and couldn’t stop shaking. Anyway, my girlfriend came up to look after me, which was necessary as at this point I couldn’t even dress myself, and I tried to get some sleep that night, but I slept terribly as every time I dosed off I jolted awake because my back seemed to spasm.

Before I went to bed, I looked at myself in the mirror. I was in an horrific state. My stomach was distended as my core musculature had completely shut down. I had a very significant lurch in my spine (which I common in disc injuries), which caused my pelvis to be significantly outside of my body’s centreline.

Next time, we will look at my first week of rehab, and what I did during that time period.