Welcome to the club. I broke my right collar bone at the end of December and had surgery with a plate and 10 screws. I was riding a spin bike after about 6 days post crash, 4 days post surgery and back on my road bike on a trainer (with the bars raised pretty high) about four or five days later. The surgery made a HUGE difference. My overall comfort level was greatly improved right after the surgery. By two weeks I was doing my normal winter training routine of 1 hour w/ 2x20' @ Tempo on the trainer every day. 3x20' on the weekends. (Normally I would have been outside on the weekend.) I was able to gingerly stand up and by four weeks I felt like I could have rode outside just fine.

The catch is that the consequences of falling again are high. I stayed inside the full six weeks and didn't ride in groups for another month on my doctors suggestion. I didn't race until early April.

Then, just a bit over a week ago, I got caught in a pile up at a local crit. In the mele I got hit from behind as I was slowing to avoid the guys on the ground in front of me and thrown down on my other shoulder. This time it is a minor fracture of the left collar bone. No surgery required and it wouldn't help even if I got it. I missed one day on the trainer and that is because I didn't get my back up bike together and on the trainer until the afternoon and it was too hot in my garage. I flipped the stem up and rotated the bars up and was back into my winter training workout routine the next day. Master's nationals are 21 days from today, 29 days from my crash. We are accelerating getting back on the road for this one. I'll probably be outside in another week or two and will race the TT and road race at nationals. I'm going to skip the crit.

From my point of view, the key is the 2x20' intervals on the trainer. That is my normal winter training diet. It is not that hard physically once you get into it and the benefits are enormous. It's only an hour. Get on, get off, get it over with. To make it even easier I break it down like this:

10' warm up
20' @ tempo, but every 5 minutes I pop it up a couple of gears and stand to give my butt, legs and arms a short break.
5' easy
20' same as above
5' cool down

I'm never more than 5' from the next thing. It makes the workout very bite sized and easy to deal with mentally.

I'm not a fan of doing anything harder than that on the trainer. Tempo on the trainer gets to be pretty easy both physically and mentally. Threshold, VO2 max, etc. are MUCH harder on the trainer than the road. Since nationals are coming up I'm sucking it up and doing some VO2 work, but it's not that fun and the most I've done is 2x5' where as my normal VO2 workout on the road would be 6 or even occasionally 8x5' @ VO2 max. No way in hell I could do that on the trainer. And no way in hell I could do 2x20' @ Threshold on the trainer. I guess I could if my life depended on it, but it's not worth it to me.

Trust me. 2x20' @ tempo on the trainer is the shit that kills.

I just looked it up on Training Peaks. I did an FTP test on Feb. 16th (Surgery was Dec. 30). My result was only 6 watts off of my normal spring FTP, only 20 watts off of peak summer form FTP. 2x20' is the shit that kills.

BTW, I got the bone stimulator (Exogen as mentioned above) and I'm also taking calcium supplements (http://www.growbone.com/) to hopefully speed the healing. I did this for the previous break also. My insurance covered the surgery and most oft he cost of the bone stimulator. I think my co-pay was about $450. And hey, I got to use it again! Lucky me...

Good luck.

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Kevin

http://kevinmetcalfe.dreamhosters.com
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