“It was nice to officially get the green light to start swimming again. It felt good to be back in the water.” It were a tough couple of months, both mentally and physically, for Lucy Charles. In March, the Ironman 70.3 World Champion experienced a major setback as she sustained a big injury: a stress fracture in her hip. Charles took us along on her rehabilitation process before, and now shares some insight into her training program now that she can finally start to do some cardio work again.
“Whilst I was in Austria, we tended to alternate my plan; I would swim one day and then aqua jog the next. I think the longest that we actually aqua jogged for was around 45 to 50 minutes, but we build up to that really gradually. So I think we started with maybe only 30 minutes, but doing that in like 3×10-minute blocks. Just to really keep that load quite low and see how the body reacted, because although aqua jogging isn’t an impact-based activity, it still put in some stress through the hip, and we needed to see how the body responded to that.”
Charles talks us through her first “steps” back into the water – and therefor into training – in the video below.
