Results of MRI are in...

Friday, June 24, 2011

I couldn’t wait until next Tuesday to hear what Nilesh had seen in my MRI, so I sent him and email and asked for the preliminary assessment. “There are some arthritic changes in your knee that are mild and the medial meniscus shows a very small tear which I’m surprised is giving you so much discomfort,” he wrote in return. He did say he’d like to give it more time before surgery, “but you have given it a lot of time already,” he concluded.

Well…I have given it a lot of time…and it was doing much better until I ran the forty minutes on the concrete golf cart path and then landed oddly on it during one of my survival workouts. My big question for him will be ‘if I give it more time, should I stay away from weight bearing exercises and stick with the bike?’ I’m thinking that if I hadn’t done the high impact stuff…which I was cleared to do…I might not have had the recurrence and maybe I would have healed. The bottom line is I’m just now getting back to being able to squat without pain again…but still can’t run at all. He did mention that even an MRI isn’t perfect and there could be more going on in the knee.

So…I’ll ride. I went out for another long one heading north and east into Willoughby Hills and Waite Hill before jumping on Eagle Road and riding it east and eventually ending up on Auburn Road for a ride south and managing to turn it into a 45-miler. I did have a great deal of tightness in the left hamstring during the ride, but suspect this may be fixed with an adjustment to my riding shoe and where it clips to the pedal and the angle of attachment it creates. I’ll experiment with that on the next ride. Tomorrow Heidi and I will be getting up early and taking the kayaks to East Branch Reservoir for another activity I can do without stressing the knee.

Bike workout: Two hours and 40 minutes.
Training Heart Rate: 130 bpm.
Calories burned during workout: 2400.