It seems a very long time ago since I last played a cricket match, but I now believe I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to my rehabilitation. There are still quite a few weeks to go before I’ll be batting and bowling for Lancashire again and I know there is yet more hard work ahead of me, but at least that goal is now in my sights.

 

Since my last knee operation I have gradually built up my training regime and included swimming and kayaking into the programme. When we first moved to Dubai, we were living in an apartment but we are now renting a house in an area called the Palm, which backs onto the sea and the beach. As I was so close to water it made sense to make the most of it, so I got myself a kayak, a snorkel and some flippers and started doing some swimming. I built up to swimming around 5kms a day in the end, but I wasn’t as keen after I got stung by a jelly fish! I’ve also been doing a lot of kayaking to try and build myself up and I’m now back in the gym doing lots of leg exercises.

 

It sounds great doing your training on the beach, but it has been hard work.  I have been working with a physio called Richard Follet, who works with my regular physio Dave ‘Rooster’ Roberts, and have really enjoyed the sessions - even though they’ve been tough. I met Richard on the Lawrence Dallaglio bike ride I embarked on recently and wanted to give my fitness a boost so I paid for him to fly out to Dubai and help me along with things. Richard is a tri-athlete, an ex-footballer, he’s a really fit lad and has a great knowledge of training as well. We started about 8.00am most days and I would finish around 2.00pm in time to go and pick up the kids from school, so they were pretty solid days. Initially, we concentrated on the upper body and then we built it up back to running. We had a spin session every day, then I would move onto the cross-trainer and onto the weights, so I was in the gym at the Jumerirah for ages – people were joking about us being in there because we were there so long! He was a really good lad to work with and I think he enjoyed it as well.

 

Recently we have moved onto doing aqua jogging in the deep sea. I have been building up to running in more shallow water and I have now progressed to running on the beach and on the treadmill. The one thing I’m unlikely to do now is hours pounding away on the treadmill because both the specialist and the physios have said there was no point to it in my situation. I think I will be concentrating on short, sharp intervals on the running machine from now on to replicate what I am likely to do on the cricket field, but I have actually found that my knee feels more comfortable when I’m running faster than when I’m just jogging.

 

I have also been back to the UK for a visit to the specialist, but it was the journey back which was the most eventful part of the trip. I was only supposed to be back for a few days but I was one of the thousands stranded by the volcanic ash cloud. At first I was quite philosophical about being unable to get home and joined Sir Ian Botham’s latest walk for Leukaemia Research. I wasn’t able to do that much walking, particularly at the sort of pace that Beefy sets, but I was able to go around with a few buckets collecting some money. Eventually I’d had enough of waiting for the authorities to give the all-clear to fly out of the UK again and after having flights cancelled right, left and centre, I decided to head for France.

 

I was driven down to Dover and got the ferry to Calais. Unfortunately, by the time I got there I had missed the train to Paris, so I was forced to sit on a bench for many hours until the trains started again. I was there for about six hours, but there were plenty of other people milling around in the same situation. I saw a lot of people going back to the UK and surprisingly, given what some of them had been through, they all seemed to be in very good spirits. I also managed to used the time to remember a few French phrases from my schooldays and when we got to Paris I managed to order my breakfast in the local dialect before making my way out to Charles De Galle airport to get my flight back home – I think my trip back to Dubai took me something like 36 hours!

 

I also picked up a bat for the first time in ages during my stay in the UK. I went down to Old Trafford and hit a few balls, which is something I’m going to have to start doing more of because there’s no point doing all this hard work on my fitness if I can’t hit a cricket ball on my return. I haven’t done anything much since that time at Old Trafford, but I want to get my knee 100% right before I start netting regularly. I want to be able to go into a net being able to move as much as I want to so I can have a proper practice. I haven’t started building up to bowling again yet, either, but hopefully that will happen soon.

 

I have gone through phases since I last played where I haven’t missed cricket as much as people would expect. Because I’ve been training and concentrating on that, I haven’t really had time to think about how England are doing or how much I’ve missed it. I didn’t sit and watch all the World Twenty20 games because we don’t have it on our television at the house, so the only time I’d see it was on the re-runs at the gym. I’ve followed Lancashire from a distance, but I try not to think about what it would be like playing in this game or that because I don’t think that would do me any good. Once I get back over to England next month and I’m closer to playing again, that’s when I’ll really get stuck in from a cricket point of view and start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.