The Rise Up Ride: Day 10, Gingerly Testing My Wounded Knee in South Dakota
Date: 2 May 2021
Start Location: De Smet, South Dakota
End Location: Huron, South Dakota
Distance: 55 km
Time: 2:37
Total elapsed: 3:55
Elevation gain: 56 m
Just before first light it dawned on me. The solution, as it had been for four hundred days at home during the Pandemic, was yoga. #YOGAEVERYDAMNDAY was my salvation and the daily practice reacquainted my nose with my knees and issued eviction notices to the several old injuries that had taken up residence in my connective tissues over the decades. And, the one thing that I had stopped doing each day while riding like hell across the Prairies might well have been the proximate cause of my current distress. The knee bone's connected to the short hamstrings.
The knee is not a simple hinge. I'd been thinking about it all wrong, blaming the same repetitive motion I'd done several million times on the trainer for months and assuming that something had randomly gone wrong. Maybe this biggest joint in the body, a complex mechanism of anterior and posterior collateral, medial and lateral ligaments, linked to the hamstrings and quadriceps muscle groups above and the gastrocnemius below, might be affected by the things connected to it. Duuuh. No yoga = short muscles and my knee was stressed and complaining.
It could have been the Advil or the Voltarin, or the day off the bike. But then it could have been the down dog and forward folds that felt so great, and maybe released torque on this poor, underappreciated biomechanical joint. But as I pedaled cautiously out of De Smet this morning I felt no pain and felt mightily relieved. It was high cadence and no load, and no squeaks from my knee during the entire ride. Whew!
Today was the first day of several smaller bites of the apple that is central South Dakota. With five weeks to ride the ~2,000 km between here and the Grand Tetons for the start of Work Week at the Teton Climbers' Ranch on 6 June, I'm in no rush. Tonight I'm in Huron and riding out at dawn to Wessington Springs, where Loree, who works for the town, said that I was welcome to pitch my tent in the City Park Campground.
