Overdoing It

You Know You Want One

So it turns out that if you have not ridden a bicycle in a serious way for over 25 years and you get a new bicycle and decide to ride it in a serious way then you are almost certainly going to hurt something. It is possible that you will not, such as if you stopped cycling when you were 2, but even then: the body needs some time to adjust after a long time away. 

For example, if you get a totally awesome new road bike that you think is the dope shit and start logging miles because the bike is awesome and rad and riding around on it is awesome and rad then you will very probably get sore knees, which is decidedly not awesome and/or rad. In less temperate climes than the type I enjoy here in lovely Southern California they call this condition 'spring knee', because riders would be drawn outside and begin to ride more as the weather warmed. You can ride 365 days a year where I live so I just call it "sore knees that are bad and hurtful" or "hurtful knees", for short. The struggle is real. 

The hurtful knees are definitely cramping my style, so I have had to scale back my riding and do more (a lot more) to loosen the angry, angry quads in an effort to ameliorate my condition. Pro cyclists get a massage after every stage of every race, and also after almost every workout (must be nice). That's not in the budget, so I have been spending some quality time with a roller and a supernova ball. It's not much better but it's not worse. You care. Soon I will be back on the roads and looking good while going slow. I have a lot more words about looking good on the bike, but that will be another post. Get excited.