My left knee and I have had a bad relationship for years. My expectations that it will do stuff when I want goes contrary to the knee's personality. It's hard to get angry with it, since I recognise that attitude...
Anyhoo, when biking I'd be fine for about 60-90 minutes then pain, and no power in the left knee. This made the return journey home slow, painful, and annoying. Three words I don't cope well with. So I sat down and thought about where the pain was, and what could be causing it. The pain was localised inside the knee, which meant it wasn't the position of the saddle (either too far back or too far forward), or height. There's a good summary here.
Looking at a the knee joint, and assessing where the pain was, my thought was that my foot was turning out on the pedal. As the pain didn't show up during my shorter rides to work (upto 30mins with some large hills) I suspected it was cumulative, or kicked off after I'd been going for awhile.
Rather than rushing out and buying clip-on's which, in theory, shoudl force my feet to keep straight. I thought it would be worthwhile trying alternatives. So I grabbed some orthotics (as I said, my knee's and I have a long history...) and went cycling with those, while paying more attention to my foot position on the pedal. This helped a lot, but I still got some twinges which I put down to laziness and letting my foot turn. The next three longer rides I strapped the knee quite heavily, and aside from sweat and some rubbing, all was good.
(some of this was done on a stand for my bike, which proved useful to keep more of an eye on my cycling style)
So I'm quite confident it's postural. Next step is getting some SPDs and shoes...
It's fun when you get to experiment on yourself. Although if any of you want me to practise some surgery, I'm totally up for that too...
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2 comments:
Isn't that the knee you busted when jumping the road island way back when?
oddly no. it's the other one.
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