Getting Old Isn't For Sissy's

The knee is pretty much recovered now. A combination of several rest days earlier this week, staying off skis, abandoning running, and taking NSAIDS drug Voltaren has brought a fairly speedy recovery from knee bursitis.

My mother is having knee issues too, and she may be a candidate for a joint replacement before too long. She commented a while back that "Getting old isn't for sissy's." One can become overwhelmed by pain unless you learn to suck it up some.

Wednesday was my first hard ride on the bike. After three days off, I was going nuts. Knee was not doing that well yet, but I reasoned that if biking didn't cause it, perhaps biking won't exacerbate the problem. I took a risk and hammered 36 miles with several hard hill intervals on my lunch break with no pain on the bike. The knee did not flare up afterwards either. I was psyched. Got in an hour of tempo on Thursday with two "leg stretcher" hill intervals. Friday was recovery spin.

Today I had a long group ride planned, but the weather didn't cooperate. The storm last night left many areas with an inch or more of frozen crud on the roads. I was going to meet Brett in Lancaster for the training ride, but on the way there he calls and says don't bother, the roads are too risky. It got called off anyway. We ended up going to his place further south where the roads were clear. I had hoped for 3-4hrs with a few big hills, but we got 2.6hrs with many smaller hills. I attacked seven of the hills vigorously, ranging from sub-minute to seven minutes in duration. My quads were quite cooked after the ride, and my knee gave me no grief.

Tomorrow I plan to phase skiing back in. I'm quite concerned this could aggravate the bursitis. I've been essentially pain free for two days now. If it goes well, I hope to do a race the following weekend. I've not had a good ski workout in two weeks, so this will be interesting.

I've updated the Hillclimb Races page at Northeastcycling.com. A tentative 2008 hillclimb events table has been added, and the page should display more uniformly across browser platforms. I am in process of rewriting many of the pages in xhtml, as opposed to MS-Word and "save-as" html. Word creates terrible HTML, and Mozilla users tell me many things don't display correctly.