Knee Pain!

Instead of sitting in a motel room in Bakersfield, California, I'm sitting in my kitchen in Las Vegas, Nevada icing my knee.  A week after the Death Valley Road Stage Race, my left knee started twinging more and more insistently.  I had to back off on intensity while I figured out what was causing it.  Sure, pushing big gears, speed work, extreme climbing, any of that could have done it.  I started researching knee pain.  Hmm.  Pain in the front of the knee?  Raise the seat post.  So I did, sort of.  A few silly millimeters.  The pain persisted.  Finally I whipped out a tape measure and low and behold, my saddle was nearly an inch too low!  WTF?  My guess is that it slowly slipped down into the seat tube over the course of a year (I didn't use a torque wrench to tighten the clamp... even though I own one... grrr), so I didn't really notice it in any conscious way.  So, last weekend I began raising it, about a half centimeter at a time.  I'm back to where it should be, and have had little or no pain three out of the last four days.  Maybe I've escaped serious damage?  I'm hoping so.  In the meantime, I'm missing the Southern California/Southern Nevada Road Championships because of my neglect of a simple, yet seriously important thing:  my saddle height.  Back in the day, with steel frames and aluminum seat posts, once a saddle height was set, it didn't slip.  Carbon fiber does, I guess, and that's one of the reasons to use a torque wrench.  It will ensure that the clamp is really tight enough.  Live and learn.  I hope I recover sufficiently to race the Mt. Whitney Stage Race (another extreme climbing event) two weeks from now.  Time is short.

In the meantime, I have some good leads on physical therapists (thank you Stephanie and Daniel), and yes, I'm going to get a new bike fit.  It's been three years since my last (and that one was 34 years after my first one and only prior... some of us are too old school for school).  I'd been thinking I should do this any way (get an appraisal of my position), but now it's imperative.  So the lesson learned?  Take nothing for granted.