The weather was just briljant yesterday. At least 30°. Maybe a bit to briljant… To avoid the most heat and highest temperatures during the day, I decided to go cycling early. So on a Sunday morning, I climbed onto my bike at the somewhat crazy time of 09:00… What was I thinking?! But it turned out to be quite ok. After just a little bit I was enjoying myself with the exercise.

Enjoying was a great description until I got to a long open stretch with the wind full in the face… Where the wind wasn’t the real problem, but my knees started hurting… Badly… The knee pain (Osgood-Schlatter) I have had ever since I was a kid, started bugging both my knees again… Strange, as I haven’t had real problems with it for a very long time now. Every now and then when there is a lot of impact on my knees (either by tough exercise, or by sitting on my knees for any time longer then a couple of minutes) it still hurts, but it’s been a while since it as painful as yesterday… :-( Not good… I didn’t feel I was totally going over the max. I rode an ok gear, had a good pace, but still it was hurting. Strange. And annoying, as cycling with pain in both knees ain’t much fun.

I was trying to do some on the bike stretching and thinking of going back when I was passed by two other cyclists… Even though they had a much quicker pace then me, I decided to accelerate and cycle behind them, or in cycling terms: “sit in the last wheel”. Amazing! I had to cycle quicker to stay behind them, but because I was behind them I wasn’t struggling through the wind anymore and could follow the quicker pace easily! Even the Osgood-Schlatter pain in knees went away quite quickly! :-)

Lovely stuff, but after sitting in last position for about 10 minutes I started feeling a bit guilty… Cycling along like that is a bit “not done”… the “sticking” in the last wheel and making use of other peoples efforts. So to relieve my sense of guilt I decided to take the lead in our little group of three for a bit. Outch… That took a lot more effort then riding along in last position… But I wouldn’t let go that easily and was fully committed to return the favor. So I struggled on for about 6 or 7 minutes on first position of the group until the guy behind me took the lead again. Also started to feel my knees a little, so it was good to be able to catch my breath in last position.

It turned out that the two people I passed had exactly the same route in mind as me. So I took my share of work in the lead of the group on the way back as well. Especially after they expressed there annoyens of people “sticking” behind them for the entire ride and not helping out at all… But I managed to keep up and do my work. Besides the last 5km, the complete ride home was in the little group, resulting in a rather mad and record breaking (for me) 33.5 km/h average for the 70km I cycled… The wonders a little group can do… especially on a ride that started out with a bad knee pain…

This entry was posted on Monday, June 20th, 2005 at 12:38 and is filed under Cycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.