It’s been over seven months since the surgery and there are days I don’t think much about my knee. It just works like it’s supposed to. No more painful popping. Sometimes it does pop on the inside, which I think is some kind of compensation due to the new tissue growth on the outside, where the damage was. It probably isn’t very smooth in there.
I still haven’t tried running yet. With a lot of work for school, the immense overhead of returning to running is just too much. With past running injuries, there is so much time that is needed for walk/jog, cross training, and way more stretching and icing to deal with potential comeback injuries. When work subsides some, hopefully within a month or two, I should have more time to try running again. With the biking that I’ve done, I’m fairly confident that my knee will tolerate some running. Otherwise, I’ve got a feeling that I would have some pain on the bike.
My bike got a flat from the resistance trainer this week. I find that odd. The tire rubs against a smooth surface on the trainer, so it wasn’t punctured. I have a feeling that the rubber tube degrades over time and eventually the glue and seams that hold it together come apart. It was probably a pinch flat: as air slowly leaked out, the underinflated tire was pinched by the rim, causing a small tear in a seam. I did notice this week that the resistance didn’t seem as much as usual although I had recently put air in the tire. This morning it was flat, and five minutes after putting in more air, it was flat again. After a tube change, the resistance seemed more normal, but I always get real paranoid about stuff like this when biking. Sooner or later, something’s going to give. It’s why I like running: no equipment to rely on.
It’s almost as if with biking, some of my stress-induced injuries that would occur with running get transferred to the bike. With running or biking, there is a single entity performing the activity with the same probability of some kind of failure. With running, it’s just me, but with biking, the bike and I are sharing the task. Sometimes I break down, and sometimes the bike breaks down. In most cases, the bike can be fixed a lot faster than I can.
I’m still considering getting a new bike, but haven’t looked into it too much. I would like a carbon fiber frame, but that jacks up the price significantly. I know Trek has a fairly wide range of relatively affordable carbon fiber bikes, but it seems that some are better than others, so I’ll have to do research. The aluminum frames I’ve ridden feel kind of twisty while the steel-framed Bianchi I’ve got is solid. The components on the Bianchi are about ground to dust so I’ve got to get something that’s fairly robust. I figure that shelling out a bit of dough will be worth it if it’s something I’m going to use every day. Like the computer monitor, I would rather pay a bit more for something that’s good and that will work well and hold up than get something cheap that will break down. If I start running again, I’ll probably not bike as much, but I would probably still do it to help ease the impact of just running and doing nothing else.
For now, I’ve got no reason to rush anything, and when the time is right, I’ll look more into running again. I do think that time is coming soon.
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