0-60 in 12 weeks!

12 weeks to the start of the RR!

And I have only just been able to start any form of exercise after 3 months following an injury. 10 days ago I started by cycling my normal Saturday run; last Saturday I did a quarter of my normal Saturday run - just under 5k out of 16k and last night a mere 10 mins on the rowing machine, and the knee has twinges from it (but that knee does anyway - probably something to do with age).

Yet in 12 weeks time I have to be skiing 60km a day or more (87km for the longest day).

So this will be my hardest challenge yet. I have set myself the target of being able to run my normal 16k by the end of the month, not at my normal speed, but not much more than 10 mins slower, without ill effects. If I can't do this, then I will have to cancel.

The dilemma is how much and how hard to train? If I overdo it to start with, then the setback in time makes it completely impossible, but if I don't start strengthening the muscles, I won't be able to cope. So I think it has to be a question of little and frequent to start with, and doing more lower impact exercise. I do have a new place to run - we have just completed a dressage arena for my wife to train her horses on and this is sand topped by rubber and provides a lovely low impact surface for running on. I can just about get a 100m circuit in. And instead of towing a gate behind the 4x4 to level it, I could try a smaller gate and pull it by hand. This would be good for training to pull sledges (pulks), which we don't do on the RR, but it should strengthen the leg muscles for pushing off the ski, and because you are leaning forward to pull, the angle is closer to that for cross country skiing.

You would have thought that with all the vast amounts of information on the web, there would be plenty about how to recover from leg injuries, but there seems to be very little practical advice. So it is a question of trying to figure it out for myself.