Fitness loss after minor, minor op - just curious!

gracieabem

Firstly, I am not too worried about this, merely curious.

I have a very minor op (four wisdom teeth out - GA) that I'm planning to schedule in Oct/Nov in between uni semesters. It's just one of those things that has to be done at some point and I'm really grateful that it is just minor surgery and I'm not in for a long, arduous recovery or that I'm seriously ill!

But I am curious about how much fitness I stand to lose with my running.

Currently I'm running 5 days per week. I've been training for an 8km race, but now I'll be slowly increasing my distances again.

I do 2 x 5km runs (one of which is a beach, hill, speed run), 2 x between 4 - 6mile runs (generally easier runs unless I just feel like going a bit harder, weird how it just happens sometimes lol!) and my long run.

The expected recovery time is one week, I'm not sure how long before adding vigorous exercise, I guess it will depend.

Any experiences with this? I'm a beginner (starting November 2011).

Azdak

There are short term and long term physical adaptations to exercise. After a layoff of 1-2 weeks you might notice a small loss of fitness. This should come back very quickly. The effect will be modest enough that there is no need to be concerned and no need tprush your recovery.

mlb929

I had major surgery last summer, and couldn't run for a month. I was released to begin again after about 3 weeks, so long as I didn't push it - I promised a friend I wouldn't track myself that first week, I knew I went slow, and it was miserable in my head. However, when I went back to tracking 4 weeks post surgery, I was right back to my old self. I had a hysterectomy, so more "core" strength then something like teeth would be - I think you'll be just fine.

I'm not on injury list and am not running for 3 weeks to avoid a possible stress fracture developing, I was reading online that so long as I keep to 70% my maximum HR through my training I will be fine. It's not the gains that I'm worried about as maintaining where I am now to not have too much of a loss. What i notice last time from surgery was that even a little loss was very quickly recovered.

drgndancer

Are you getting them pulled or cut out? I had mine pulled and it only really took me out for a few days. That's hardly worth worrying about, won't slow you down much at all. If you're getting them cut out, that will be a bit longer. Probably a couple of weeks. Still not a major outage, but you'll lose a bit of progress. Start a bit slower and a bit shorter than your max when you come back, and work to recover before you try to progress. You won't lose much either way, but pulling is definetely less stressful (not fun, but not as bad).

Yanicka1

I had a minor abdominal surgery in april and could not exercise for a week. I had no impact what so ever. In fact i had more fitness loss from giving blood last month than i did from surgery

gracieabem

Thank you so much for your replies and experiences. It's been very helpful and has left me thinking that it certainly won't impact a great deal on my fitness levels. I'm getting them cut out.