Saving My Knees: How I Proved My Doctors Wrong and Beat Chronic Knee Pain

Saving My Knees: How I Proved My Doctors Wrong and Beat Chronic Knee Pain Read Free

Book: Saving My Knees: How I Proved My Doctors Wrong and Beat Chronic Knee Pain Read Free
Author: Richard Bedard
Tags: Health
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enthusiasm for basketball eventually waned as I realized my shortcomings on the court. I stood only a few inches taller than average and lacked quickness and aggressive instincts. My modest talent usually sufficed for making the squad, but not much more.
    After reaching high school, I decided to try something different. On a whim, I signed up for the cross-country team.
    Distance running should have fit me well. I was a slender six-footer who possessed more endurance than speed. Also my bookish nature gave me a high tolerance for being alone. I was the kind of teenager who, on a warm summer day, would disappear with a novel by Vonnegut or Dostoyevsky and hide away under a nearby bridge, reading intently as the water swept past.
    Despite that, in my mid-teens, I couldn’t get too excited about setting out on training runs on quiet, dusty roads that never seemed to end. Running long distances—basically, anything more than a mile—strikes most high school students as boring and pointless. Besides, being on the cross-country team wasn’t considered cool. We were the athletic versions of the chess club nerds.
    In high school, I was a joyless runner. In college, my attitude changed completely. I was at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, majoring in government. Jogging along the broad Charles River helped relieve stress. Gradually my legs became leaner and stronger. Sometimes it felt as if I was flying over the ground, swallowing chunks of the paved riverside trail with each stride. Running became fun.
    On vacations I began to clock my times on a 4.5-mile hilly loop of road in my hometown. The route swept along blueberry barrens, through stands of evergreen woods, and over a rushing river. My mother, who took up running too, entered us in local races. I was never fast enough to win, but kept improving. At the age of twenty-five, I finished a 10K in 36:34.
    In my twenties, running happened to be an ideal way to keep fit. It was cheap (just the price of an occasional pair of Asics or New Balance shoes), and I could lace up and take off anywhere in the world. That proved especially convenient. In the six years after graduating from college, I lived everywhere from Switzerland and Paris to California, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and New York City. For a while I taught high school students computer science, then got a journalism degree and became a newspaper reporter.
    Then, in my thirties, running lost its appeal. I wasn’t doing it regularly and nagging injuries started to bother me. Even though they were minor ailments such as shin splints and sore foot arches, the magic feeling of effortlessness vanished. I began to feel sluggish and plodding.
    I didn’t realize it then, but my changing weight surely affected me. I went from 172 pounds in college to 185 pounds in my mid-thirties. That doesn’t seem like much of a difference, but there’s a multiplier effect at work during the act of running. For each extra pound you carry, as much as six more pounds of force are transmitted into the knee joint.
    In the fall of 2000, seeking a less stressful activity, I made a fateful decision. A year earlier I’d moved to Fort Lauderdale to become an assistant business editor at the Sun-Sentinel newspaper. Sun-drenched Florida, where almost all the beachgoers look fit and tan, was terrific for year-round sports. I had done some cycling alone in the mid ‘90s, while living in Oklahoma and writing a book about tornadoes. So I joined a biking club.
    For months I stuck out like a sore thumb. In cycling, unlike running, equipment and style matter. Riders bragged about their lightweight, fast bikes that cost up to $5,000. They debated brands of headsets, cassettes, pedals, forks, seats. Meanwhile I couldn’t even get the basics right. My socks were wrong, my helmet was too large and clunky, and my solid-blue jersey looked like a plain Jane at the ball compared with their busily and brightly patterned ones.
    So I upgraded my sporting wardrobe while

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