Greetings, Earthlings! What it is? Feeling somehow like a pretty picture or two should accompany my prose, but that's the kind of petty nonsense that's been keeping me silent, so perish the thought, let's do this. Bicycles, bicycles, bicycles. What else?
When we left off last, I think I'd had my right knee scoped for the second time, I was fat, happy, and slow as a mofo. Was a rough mild winter too. Saw the dark side of 180 pounds (that's like 82 kilos for you civilized folk). Woooooah Shamu! Who knew that pizza at Little Stevie's and barfing up tequila in the middle of Boylston at 3 am weren't the way to prepare for race season? Race season, hah. Not even so sure about that. But with friends like mine, you have to train just to train. Fuckers won't relax and slow down, ever.
Anyway, last winter I met Mr. Greg Robidoux at Mo Bruno's end of year reception at the Ride Studio Cafe. So when it came time for a little post-op rehabilitation of the physical therapeutical kind, naturally I called on him. And he showed me what a train wreck my aged body had become. But we worked through it. Sort of. My hip stabilizing muscles are practically non-existent. This does not help my knee tracking. And some of my joints aren't joined so well, things don't move all that freely. It all seems so obvious now. So we worked on some stuff, and I returned to riding and running. My left (not scoped since 1996) knee gave me more trouble than the one we cleaned up this time.
I also have been getting treatment from a rolfer/muscular therapist, Carol Joy Ortiz down here in nearby Norton. She does amazing work, and has been incredibly helpful. One thing that resonated the most from both her and mostly Greg was that SITTING IS THE ENEMY! We should not sit in "comfortable" chairs so much. Or at all, at least that is what I'm beginning to wonder about. I sit a lot. Way too much. In the morning, I sit and drink coffee and surf the net. Then I get in my car and sit for the short drive to work. Where I sit some more. A lot more. Then after work I sit on my bike. When that is over I come home and sit while I eat dinner and surf the net some more. Then I sit while I have some scotch before bedtime. Hell, I'm sitting right now. Fuck.
Why is sitting so bad? Ten years ago, when I quit my old job and came to work in I.T., I thought "this is so awesome, I can recover from my workouts at work!" We all know the cyclist's creed, never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down. Well, maybe if all you want to do is ride fast until you're 35, then just die. I never appreciated my old job very much. Working hard, and breathing organic solvent vapors for median-ish income didn't seem like such a great deal at the time. But it wasn't repetitive, and it wasn't totally sedentary. It did not take me long to miss the variety. But it's taken until now for me to miss the physical side of it. Sitting on ones ass all day is not the way. I'm not sure what I can do at this point in life, but at the very least, a greater effort to counter the ill effects of sitting will be required.
Kind of embarrassing that I never noticed how much sitting hurts me until someone pointed it out. I can go into work at 10 am feeling like a million dollars, and by 11:30 when I get up to go to lunch I'm a mess. Getting up once an hour and walking a lap of the building is not enough. At least not for me. As a cyclist, the psoas group and some of the other hip flexors get all short and tight. Eventually this affects alignment of your pelvis and messing with your already oversat posture. In my case, a couple of abdominal surgeries on my right side early in life probably didn't help much either, leaving lots of scar tissue (open incision appendectomy on Christmas eve in the barbaric 70's, can you say half-drunk surgeon, hello!), fostering asymmetry.
Enough excuses, bottom line is for a while, when I was running a lot, I worked harder on staying flexible and structurally strong, helping to neutralize the effects of sitting and twisted biomechanics. Worked well for several seasons, but in 2011 when my knee started showing signs of wear again, I stopped running, and when I'm not running, I stop stretching, and bad just gets worse. It's amazing how quickly things snowball during the winter, leading me to a nearly unraveled state by January. Trying to ramp up the bike hours though, my knees remained problematic, all twitchy and achy during harder efforts. It felt like my saddle was too low...
Considering my position on the bike somewhat a sacred cow, I've rarely messed much with it since being fitted with Belgian methods when I first started riding. Over time pedal and shoe changes led me to play with saddle height a bit. But not much. Mostly I only tried to compensate for changes in the pedal stack height, and switching models of saddles. Bar drop, reach, and saddle setback are variables that I didn't always track and/or measure closely enough, and of course we all how the evolution of the size and shape of brake hoods dramatically shifted (pun intended) the way riders set up their bars. The demise of the quill stem didn't make proper fit any easier, nor did the bike industry going to S-M-L sizing of frames. And, since I've lost a centimeter or two of height over the past decades, lowering the saddle a bit made sense.
For a know-it-all like me, seeking professional help can be quite traumatic. Luckily, I like Greg, and more importantly I trust him. Not only does he have a similar racing style to mine, he's about the same size, and most importantly, he has read me and my ailments like a book since day one. And while Greg is a mild-mannered physical therapist by day, he's also a lead instructor at the Serotta Institute, training cycling industry professionals in bike fitting. Now, I know how a lot of bike racers feel about fitting systems, because I'm one of them. We know best, slam the stem, hammer the saddle back, suck it up, and suffer. All my bikes have -17 degree stems, because low bars are better, allowing you to make more power, and I hate the look of a rise stem, even a -8, especially with a level top tube. Yet in pictures of me riding, the look wasn't right. But I couldn't figure out what was wrong.
OK, here's an idea. Since it's taken me two days just to pen a back story chock full of weak verbs and repetition (this is why I don't blog anymore), let's open up the floor for comments and predictions. I've ridden with many of you assholes, and nobody has ever said much about how I sat on the bike. And we all know I'm extremely approachable and open to criticism. This is one way to see if anyone still visits, so let's hear it. Thanks for reading.
