anyone thought there cycling days were over due to knee pain

sibike

Hopefully im being abit premature with my assumtpion that my cycling days are numbered . To cut a long story short , this time last year i could cycle 80-100 in a day but lately i can only manage 40 miles due to knee pain . ive just taken a month off the bike to see if that would help but today decided to go for a slow ride but after 10 miles i was in agony (worst than ever x10 ) and i was 10 miles away from home so i struggled home .
im going to phone my gp tomorrow to get an appointment next week to see what they say .i also asked my lbs about a bike fit but they wanted £150 per bike which i thought was a bit steep . though im not sure it is the bike because ive had the same set up for 5 years .
the pain feels like its behind the knee caps ( hard to explain ) and its painful to climb the stairs for a few days after a ride .
another dilema ive got is thats its my 40th very soon and the wife wanted to get me a new bike with a contribution from me as well but i cant stop thinking that this could be a waste of money .
anyway , have any of you gone through what im going through and thought the worst ??

Anonymous

Get thyself to Adrian Timmis at www.cadencesport.co.uk

I had reet bugger knee pain that was sorted due to his fit. It included some moulded footbeds and I got some shims to account for a leg length difference he found and they were angled so they sorted out my knee tracking issues.

No knee pain since...

topcattim

sibike wrote:

anyway , have any of you gone through what im going through and thought the worst ??

Yes, something similar, and I'm glad to say I'm now out the other side. I used to be a hockey player, but packed it in after a horror tackle that collapsed my knee in a direction it wasn't supposed to go. First mistake I made: I just let it get "better" in its own time (i.e. without any medical oversight, no physio), and eventually I managed to play again, but the knee never felt as strong. Eventually, I stopped hockey, and took up cycling, and always felt that I was cycling one-legged, i.e. had more power in one leg than the other. After about 5 years, this developed into nagging and fairly continuous knee pain, so I went to see a physio. Second mistake: the physio just dealt with the symptom (i.e. gave me massage, ultrasound) but didn't look at the muscular imbalance.

In the meantime, I had been for a bike fit with the bike whisperer in Ealing which identified a few problems in my ride position, and really helped me feel better on the bike.

Good news was that these two interventions (bike fit and physio) patched me up enough for a week in the Alps in 2010 and to get round the Marmotte, but when I came back, the knee was hurting even more. So I stopped riding, and after a good bit of agitation, got a knee op on the NHS. Nothing major, just a bit of scraping out behind the knee cap, and a bit of snipping out of unnecessary tissue. Oh, and post-op DVT but that was another story.

I had hoped that would sort me out, but found that I couldn't build the strength on the bike back up, and still experienced some pain. I had been going to the gym, trying to build up my strength and it just wasn't working. At this point, I had thought I had done all I could, and I was beginning to resign myself to giving up, but I decided to give it one last go and I went to a different physio, who looked at my overall body balance, and showed me how my quads had withered away, and more importantly, how the exercises that I was doing to build strength weren't actualy going to help me that much (I was doing sets of too many, with too little weight each time). He changed my exercise regime and it made a huge difference.

Finally, I went back to the bike whisperer who looked at my foot position in more detail and put some orthotics in my shoes, which felt a bit unnatural at first, but have taken away all my residual pain.

So, the lessons from my story:

* get some proper physio advice on first sign of injury
* be suspicious of physio intervention which is just about massage etc. In my case, it also needed to be tied to some focused gym work
* get a decent bike fit (not sure I'd do this through my LBS!)
* don't be afraid to agitate through the NHS to get an op. It took a year to work through the process, but it was worth persevering
* and don't give up. I nearly did, but am glad I didn't, and have survived a couple of mammoth sportives this year, with no problems at all.

Hope you get back on the road.

johnboy183

+1 to what NapoleonD recommends

freehub

I had pretty bad knee problems, I just changed my pedaling slightly and did a few exercises, sorted. Although I have the cartilage in my knee is slightly worn on the patella.

Headhuunter

Cyclists often end up with patella tracking because of differences in strength in the muscles along the outer edge of the thigh and the inner thigh causing the patella/knee cap to be pulled across to the outside of the leg... Nothing that can't be solved with some stretching and strengthening of the muscles on in the inner side (the teardrop muscle/vastus medalis)...