When riding becomes black and white

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write this without sounding like a big, whiny baby. I might not succeed.

Sometime last summer, my left hip started bothering me. Not while I was on the bike, but afterward, or when hiking. Just a little stiff. And since it didn’t interfere with riding, I didn’t worry much about it. But we had a trip coming up that would involve a lot of walking.

So I did what I should have done much sooner and saw the orthopedist my wife had seen about her hip. And I learned I have severe osteoarthritis. An MRI later confirmed that plus a torn labrum (anterior, posterior, and superior). And complete superior cartilage loss.

Both weekends before that appointment I’d done 65-mile gravel rides and felt great. But within a month, any riding was starting to bother me. I went from nearly 14 hours a week on the bike to maybe four.

Riding became binary: I had good hip days and bad hip days. On a bad hip day, the discomfort and occasional real pain took all the color from my ride, sapped all the joy. We’ve all had rides where for whatever reason you’re not feeling it. The legs aren’t there, or for some reason you can’t stay with the group you usually hang with. It doesn’t make it a bad ride (especially if you’re with good friends); it’s just not a great day. You can still appreciate the morning sun cutting through the mist in the trees, the bunny that darts across the road just ahead of you – all of the things you couldn’t have predicted when you started but that make even the worst ride tolerable.

About 55 miles of road and gravel around Girona, Spain, with my daughter-in-law, Ana. The best of the good hip days.

On a bad hip day the pain steals all of that, hides it from you, and demands all of your attention. On the worst day, I came close to pulling the plug and calling my wife to come get me. If I’d been inside on the trainer I would have gotten off in the first 10 minutes.

That’s the good thing about living on the side of an admittedly small mountain: when you start a ride heading down hill, there’s no real incentive to turn around early. I’d been managing the bad hip days by just easing up until things were tolerable. Some days that meant my average power was below my average heart rate. Even so, rides were still binary. A bad hip day was a bad hip day no matter how slow I was going.

Almost home on another good hip day. I don’t think I took any pictures on bad hip days...

The other day I felt great for the first 20 or 30 minutes, and then I noticed that things seemed harder and my power was dropping. It felt like a bad hip day coming on. I’ve been doing the same two-hour loop for the past month, so I stuck with it. And something changed.

I’m convinced it was the guy in the green pickup truck. I had the green light on Alton, just past the cement plant; he was stopped at the Queenstown Road intersection to my left. But as I entered the intersection, my light still green, he pulled forward and turned left in the same direction I was going. I yelled. I think he may have been looking at his phone. There was no other traffic, and it was a quiet Sunday morning. He got behind me and a little further down the road turned off. But I was still incensed. Heart rate was up. I was pushing harder.

And my hip wasn’t bothering me. Turns out distraction can be a pretty effective anesthetic.

On all the rides before when I’d been focused on whether this was going to be a good hip day or a bad one, I think I actually made it more likely it would be a bad hip day. Few experiences in life are truly binary, but an easy way to make it binary is to focus on just one thing.

So now I’ve had a string of unqualified good hip days, and I’ve got a goal ahead: not some long ride or a bucket-list race. It’s a new hip. I’m less than a month out from surgery and I’m going to keep doing that easy two-hour loop as much as I can so I’m in the best shape possible. I’m doing everything I can to ensure there are nothing but good hip days ahead.