Oh well, all good things come to an end, and in my case my training has been undone by a knee injury! I first noticed a niggle in my left knee after the long day of climbing in the Royal National Park a couple of weeks ago. It felt like my patella wasn’t tracking properly, but was scraping on something. Since I’d been fiddling with the float on my pedals and my seat in the days prior to the ride, I assumed that was the problem. I put them back to their previous settings and had no trouble with the knee over the following two weeks so thought nothing more of it.
I’d booked in to see a physio anyway and when the appointment came up I went along for an assessment. She diagnosed me as hardly using my core at all, having bad posture and accused me of being a tight-arse :) Well not quite, but she did say I had tight glutes and all those things were probably contributing to my knee issue in varying degrees. Exercises and stretches were prescribed.
I continued training but the problem flared up again when I did my next hard interval session, requiring me to put a lot of power out. It’s not painful, so I wasn’t too concerned and I stuck to my plan and went down to ride some serious hills with Simon the weekend before last. Although I was concerned at how the knee would cope, I needed to find out now rather than wait until I got to France. While the ride wasn’t too much of an issue, the knee was quite sore at the end of it and I was straight into the physio on Monday.
Ultimately it’s an inflammation and there’s no way of knowing whether I’m doing damage to cartilage or not without doing an MRI which isn’t practical since I’m off to France in less than a week. Hailey’s diagnosis was to take it easy for a bit, build back up gradually and see how the knee reacts, so I took last week off the bike completely, which was probably just as well as it took until Thursday before my knee felt OK again! I have only done one ride this week due to copious amounts of rain, but I’ve a long, flat ride scheduled for the weekend, so that will give a good indication of what’s going on.
If that relatively easy ride causes multi-day inflammation I may have to seriously revise my cycling plans in France. After all, if a 118km ride with 1800m vertical causes 6 days of knee pain, the 175km w/ 5000m vertical of La Marmotte could be a real problem!
In the meantime I just have to keep going my exercises and stretches and see what happens. Fingers crossed.