Who Knew How Painful Armpits Muscles could be

My second day at Fraser Bike Shop training consisted of what is called a brick workout.  A brick workout in the triathlon world means doing at least two back to back disciplines in a row such as bike-run or swim-bike.  In the case of this workout, it was a 90 minutes.   I was still nervous but it was Sunday morning at noon so I was much less rushed and relaxed upon arriving.  There were only 3 others that attended so that made the experience much easier than a hustling bustling room full of athletes.

The brick workout scheduled went like this:
10 minute run
5 minute on the swim bench
20 minute bike

Repeat 3 times for a total of 90 minutes.

I followed this workout and then did some other exercises that use various equipment in the lab after.  I wanted to make sure I understood how to do them all while I had the coach there with me.  They were assigned on my schedule the previous week but I wasn't positive on some of them.  So I did 30 minutes of these exercises before heading home.

5 minutes on the swim bench sounds easy enough..... and looked easy enough but I am here to tell you that it was not so easy!  The bench looked kinda like this picture here but when you pull your body moves forward and back.

I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to lay on my breasts and tummy yet (still post op tenderness) and do the swim bench.  I let Coach Tony know after he showed us what to do.  He told me to add time to the bike if I had problems.  I told him I would give it a try but didn't know what to expect.

The run was an easy run, then I went to the swim bench for the first 5 minutes.  I laid down on the bench and didn't have a problem so started pulling away.  By the end of the 5 min I was sweating profusely.  It was much harder than it looked.  On my second round through, it was tough getting through the 5 minutes.  Really tough.  One of the gals on the bike was really great at encouraging me to finish so I kept pushing through.  The third round came around and it took me some extra time to get my sweat jacket positioned under my chest to help cushion the tenderness.  Tony saw me and told me I could just do the bike but I said no, that I wanted to finish it.  That third set was even harder.  I was dripping sweat and it was painful.

I didn't realize how painful it was until Monday morning.  As the morning went on, the pain got worse.  I couldn't lift my left arm above my head.  It hurt so bad.  I took motrin and started icing the area.  I didn't realize I had muscles in my arm pit.  This was a new pain that penetrated from underneath my armpit, along side my rib cage, and down the under part of my upper arm.  My right arm hurt too but nothing like the left one.  I overdid it.  :(

I modified everything working out Monday evening and have been laying off using the arm at all.  It is now Wednesday night and it still hurts just as badly.  I got a deep tissue massage tonight which helped a bit with range of motion but the pain is still awful.  I guess I'd better be more careful and ease back into using those reconstructed muscles when I'm ready to get back at it.  I think I'll be a bit leary of that darn swim bench though!  And since when did arm pits have muscles that could be so darn painful!?!

I head back tomorrow night for another ride but I'm ready to take it on this time!