Yesterday, I tried getting back on the trainer for a quick lunchtime ride. It quickly became obvious that I had some major residual pain in my knee from the previous day. Since I haven’t had this problem ever before, it’s been very distressing. I knew that I didn’t want to continue the workout I was attempting. I also was quite sure that I have been feeling something clunking in the drivetrain somewhere. While spinning, I kept noticing that I felt a “bump” just about to the top of the pedal stroke on my left side (knee pain side.) I hopped off and checked the crank arm, and sure enough there was a few degrees of glide of the crankarm (FSA spindle axle.) I’m kicking myself for not looking there before, but what can I say, I’m a rookie.
Since I’ve been working a lot on my spinning and pedal stroke on the trainer this winter, I’m guessing that eveytime I kicked over the top, it was like I was kicking my toe into a wall. Let’s see a pedal cadence of 90 would add up to 5,400 pedal strokes per hour… for 6 hours per week that would be 32,400 pedal strokes for the week… over roughly 4 weeks (a guess) would be 129,600 pedal strokes since I got the loose crankarm! That’s a lot of repetition, and plenty of time to brind about this injury. I guess my focus was on other things, (like keeping my Clif Bars down on team rides.) Hopefully this was the problem and I caught it early enough to have it calm down quickly. By the way, the info on “Spring Knee” still holds, just luckily isn’t the problem that I have.
