On October 4th, 2020 I crested an eight-mile climb, high above the village of Spitzenberg on a dirt road in a rural part of Columbia County about 10 miles northwest of downtown Scappoose when I stopped and had an epiphany. I was 30 miles from home at that point and was just about to descend even deeper into the woods and logging roads between Highway 30 and Highway 47. With the “bullshit miles” behind me, the ride was just getting good.
But something didn’t feel right. A bump on the inside of my right knee had become too obvious for me to ignore. So I aborted my route and headed home. I had two hours to think about what was happening and I’d been down this road before (literally and figuratively). I knew I’d reached a point of no return. ‘Here we go again,’ I thought.
30 years prior to that ride, when I was 16, I tore the ACL ligament in my left knee in a junior varsity basketball game. I remember going to launch off the gym floor and looking straight down at my thigh while my foot was way off to the outside. That injury cost me an entire year of high school basketball. I spent a year rehabbing. Then just a few games into my final varsity season, I tore my other ACL. I knew I’d reached a point of no return. ‘Here we go again,’ I thought.
Not being able to play varsity basketball was a huge disappointment in my life (I’m still not over it!). But cycling helped steer me out of my funk. When I found competitive cycling in college, I didn’t even care about basketball anymore. I just wanted to be the fastest guy in town. I rode and trained and raced hard for years. Then I buckled down to graduate, got married, had kids, moved to Portland, started a blog.
I started racing again in 2011, doing Short Track at PIR and cyclocross races whenever I could. I raced most years between then and 2019, but I mostly loved big, solo rides. The more climbing, the better. And if it wasn’t hard it wasn’t fun.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was wearing out my knees. Those two ACL replacements and three other knee surgeries 25+ years ago meant I’d been gnashing bone-to-bone all those miles all those years. I remember in 2000 or so, one of my knee doctors told me after an exam, “You should probably not ride out of the saddle anymore.”
I obviously didn’t take that advice. Partly because I was young and arrogant and felt like my body could do anything. But also because climbing out of the saddle was my favorite part of cycling. And isn’t cycling supposed to be good for your knees?!
In hindsight, and in light of what happened at the top of that climb in 2020, I should have chilled out a bit. When most people say, “Cycling is good for your knees,” they’re not necessarily talking about a 100 mile ride with 8,600 feet of climbing.
It’s been nearly five years since I put on the spandex and did a real big ride. It was strange at first to just quit cold turkey. But I love all the extra time I have. Getting away from serious cycling has allowed me to find new perspectives, new parts of my life, and to rediscover old ones I’d sacrificed at the altar of training rides. That’s the upside.
The downside is my health and fitness have suffered. I don’t get much exercise riding around town for work. As my concerns about my knees worsened, I began riding electric bikes almost exclusively, something I’ve done for a few years now. I could feel the spiral setting in: avoid the pain, don’t exercise, get older, feel worse, avoid the pain, don’t exercise, get older, feel worse, and so on.
In 2022 I saw a knee doctor. He basically said there was nothing he could do. I was too young for a knee replacement and I didn’t have a severe injury requiring surgery. Just manage the pain and wear a big brace if I need stability, he said. I didn’t like that diagnosis, but I was too exasperated with it all to do anything about it. I’d given up until a few months ago at Bike Happy Hour I overheard someone (hi Scott!) talking about their knee surgery. It went great, they said, and they were back to riding hard and feeling good. I got the name of his doctor and grabbed an appointment.
After some imaging and an evaluation, this new doctor said I was a great candidate for total joint replacement surgery. We scheduled both knee replacements at that first visit. I go in for the first one tomorrow.
35 years after my first knee surgery, I’m choosing to go through it again. Twice. It sucks to be missing a bunch of bike events this spring and summer, and it will not be good for my business, but I’m tired of having “bad knees.” If all goes according to plan, they’ll be good again (after some hard days and lots of physical therapy), for the first time since I was a teenager.
Maybe I’ll trying dunking again. Just kidding! I just want to ride bikes and not think about how my knees will feel the next day.
So things will be slow around here for the next week or so as I recover. Hopefully I’ll be back out on the streets in May. Then I go back under the knife in mid-June for my other knee. A shitty summer for an amazing (hopefully) rest of my life. I’ll take it!
