Intro
I’ve not been blogging here much recently over the last 8 months and the main reason for that is I had a pretty nasty knee injury on Good Friday (29th April, 2024) when I fell off my eMTB in McLeans Island Forest when riding with my son. This kicked off a massively disrupted period in my life where I needed two reconstructive surgeries to repair a ruptured quadricep tendon.
I’m writing this post now in early November 2024 as I achieved one of the major milestone goals I’d set myself and visualised throughout the days, weeks and months of rehabilitation following the injury. This goal was to bike to Scarborough Beach and view the sea there: mission accomplished!
If you’re just here for the gory pictures, here are the shots of my knee after each surgery. On the left is two weeks after the first surgery and the first time I saw the extent of the scar! On the right is about four days after the second surgery:
As this post could get quite long, here are some links to skip around:
Timeline
This has been quite a journey, so I thought I’d represent the milestones in the table below:
| Date | Event | Days Since Injury |
| 29th March, 2024 | Good Friday: Fell off my eMTB in McLeans Forest & ruptured my left quadriceps tendon | 0 |
| 29th March, 2024 | Hospital Accident & Emergency evaluation, x-ray, sent home awaiting swelling to reduce | 0 |
| 4th April, 2024 | Self-checked back into A&E (after hearing nothing), ultrasound reveals ruptured quadricep tendon and bone chips from my patella up my thigh | 6 |
| 5th April, 2024 | 8am surgery to reconstruct my knee. 3hr surgery | 7 |
| 8th April, 2024 | Discharged from hospital | 10 |
| 15th May, 2024 | First real “walk” on crutches following surgery – 800m | 47 |
| 25th May, 2024 | First drive to a park for an independent walk by myself – 1.7km in 42mins!! | 57 |
| 17th June, 2024 | First aqua-jog in the pool to assist rehab and try reduced weight bearing walking | 80 |
| 24th June, 2024 | Surgeon appointment reveals need for second surgery | 87 |
| 17th July, 2024 | Second surgery to improve range of motion in the knee | 110 |
| 18th July, 2024 | Discharged from hospital | 111 |
| 11th August, 2024 | First bike ride since accident (1km on an eBike) | 135 |
| 2nd September, 2024 | First bike ride (no e-assist) – 14km | 157 |
| 9th September, 2024 | Return to work full time | 164 |
| 15th September, 2024 | Fly to Malta/Spain for two week holiday | 170 |
| 7th October, 2024 | First Zwift (indoor bike ride)- 12.5km | 192 |
| 19th October, 2024 | First ‘real’ outdoor ride on gravel bike – 30km (Rangiora to home) | 204 |
| 2nd November | First road bike ride: the goal I’d visualised throughout rehab – 38km | 218 |
There are many more milestones ahead as I continue the rehabilitation journey, but the above represent the main ones so far.
Injury
In the two weeks leading up to the injury I’d been for a few rides with my kids, with Niamh on the road bikes:
I’d also started to take Theo for some MTB rides at McLeans Island Forest and he was really enjoying it:
So after we attended the Good Friday Easter Church service, Theo and I headed back to McLeans Island Forest for a quick ride. It was all going great and we had completed about 18km and with only 1.5km to the carpark when the accident happened. I was riding behind Theo heading into a corner when I somehow managed to clip his rear wheel with my front wheel. If you’ve ridden bikes a lot you’ve likely clipped the wheel in front many times and never fallen off.
Well, for some inexplicable reason I still can’t explain, I was not able to recover: I immediately got the wobbles going through the corner, and whether my pedal dug into the ground or something else happened, I don’t recall falling off, but I do recall clearly what happened next.
I was lying on the ground feeling like my knee had exploded. I could hear “someone” yelling loudly in absolute agony and then I realised: that’s me screaming in pain! I told myself to get a grip, your son is here so calm down. I called out to Theo “Mate, I don’t want to move, I think I must have dislocated my kneecap as that is the only thing I can think that would cause this level of pain. Can you have a look at it and see if it’s in the right place or twisted to the side?” Theo wandered over and replied “It looks fine Dad … can we get going now?!”
I knew immediately I was not going anywhere quickly, and soon a couple of other bikers pulled up and asked if I needed a hand, asking if I could stand up. Looking at my leg, I knew I couldn’t stand, it was already swollen and was shaking involuntarily. It was 4:45pm and I knew it would get colder and darker soon and I had a voice in my head telling me “you need to move now before your leg gets worse – you need to get to the carpark where someone can help you – now.” So I asked the guys to help me stand up and immediately I realised I could not put any weight on my leg. It was too far to walk assisted to the carpark but I just knew I had to get moving, so I asked them to bring my eMTB over and I put the dropper post seat down, thinking (foolishly) I could increase the e-Assist and try and pedal with my one good right leg.
I sat on the seat, took a deep breath and pedalled … one stroke, two strokes, then I lost my balance
As I started to lose my balance I knew instinctively I was going to fall to “the wrong side” – my injured left side. It all happened in slow motion because I had plenty of time to think “My left leg is not going to be able to hold my weight, it’s so damaged it’s going to collapse under me … this is going to REALLY hurt” and that’s exactly how it played out.
My left leg crumpled under me, the bike fell on top of it, and I experienced for the second time in 10minutes extreme pain, sort of 13/10 pain level. The guys sat me up again and I took a good 10mins to regather myself, but that voice in my head kept saying “you need to move. NOW. you need to get out of this space.” So I decided to try get back on my bike and this time sit on the bike and just push with my good right leg as if it was a scooter. I also told myself to lean right, so if I lost my balance I’d lean to my good leg and not my wrecked leg. I started this and got about 50m, pretty slowly, when one of the guys said he’d come up and push me on the shoulder.
This worked effectively as the two guys rode alongside me pushing me as my left leg dangled uselessly by my side and I hoped furiously that it would not catch on any rocks on the trail and get further injured. My son biked along behind us, and after 20mins we made it back to the carpark. Fortunately, there was a small shop there that gave me a bag of ice, and I sat with my leg propped up my by helmet under my knee and a bag of ice on it as I waited for my wife to come and pick me up.
By this point the pain was very “spicy” and absolutely at the forefront of my consciousness – it really was very, very painful.
Pro Tip: Many people, including those in the hospital, told me at this point I should have called an ambulance rather than have my wife pick me up. Firstly, they would have had stronger pain relief on board and secondly arriving at hospital via ambulance immediately means the injury is taken more seriously. I think in future, this is exactly what I’d do.
My wife arrived with 60mg of Codeine for me and after a bit of an effort and some assistance I managed to get into the car. I could not put any weight on my leg, it was shaking with pain/shock and was extremely sore. Fortunately, my eldest daughter’s boyfriend had come with my wife and was able to drive my car home. We headed home, dropped the bikes off, and then my daughter dropped us at the hospital Accident and Emergency department.
I was seen pretty quickly and sent off for an x-ray. The orthopaedic team thought I’d likely shattered my patella (knee cap) based on the swelling and pain. The knee was not looking great:
When I returned from the x-ray, I was given some laughing gas and asked if I could lift my leg – this is a test to determine if there was any ligament/tendon damage. Even though I was high on gas, I didn’t think I managed to lift my leg (nor did my wife) but the attending nurse seemed ‘happy’ with the effort. He declared the x-ray was negative but there was too much swelling to determine ligament/tendon damage so I should go home and they’d recall me later the next week once the swelling would have gone down.
I was not really thinking clearly due to the pain and laughing gas so soon found myself with a budget leg brace around my knee to immobilise it and I was being wheeled to the carpark in a wheelchair to be picked up.
Because my wife had given me 60mg of Codeine at the forest, the hospital was reluctant to give me any further pain relief in the hospital beyond paracetamol which meant the pain in my knee was really starting to get pretty fiery. They gave me a prescription for some Tramadol and with that, I was heading home.
With my Easter long weekend plans in tatters, I knew I was not going to be able to walk upstairs to my bedroom, so I moved into the downstairs bedroom which fortunately has an ensuite too. The following day I tried to take a shower to wash off the blood and dirt from the crash. Sitting on a stool, the combination of heat, pain and exertion meant I came very, very close to fainting in the shower, despite me trying to keep it short.
The swelling had completely consumed my left knee cap and quadricep, removing any definition there at all and so for 6 frustrating days I tried not to move and keep my leg elevated, compressed and iced:
This doesn’t look normal…
Despite the assurances from the hospital I’d be receiving a call-back after the Easter break, this never materialised and with my knee still massively swollen and in real pain, I went back on Thursday (6 days after the injury) to start the assessment again through A&E. The medical team were initially confused as to why I’d checked myself back in but after taking a look at my knee they decided to try the “drop test”. This involved them holding my leg off the side of the bed by the ankle and then asking me to try and “hold” the knee out straight. If I could not hold it up then there was an indicator of tendon damage.
I shuddered at the prospect of this given the pain in my knee, so they helpfully gave me a big hit of laughing gas before asking me to attempt this. As soon as they let go, my leg fell towards the ground stopped only by the excessive swelling around the knee. Despite the laughing gas, this was excruciating.
Getting ready to take a big hit of laughing gas!
The consulting orthopaedic registrar said to me “I suspect you’ve ruptured your quadriceps tendon based on failing that test. On this basis you will almost certainly need surgery. Let me check with my boss whilst I send you off for an ultrasound”
I was wheeled down for an ultrasound where the very helpful woman there gently applied gel to my knee and apologised for likely pain as she started to scan my knee. I remember clearly the look of concern on her face as she started to scan further and further up my leg before she turned to me and said:
I hate to tell you this Sam, but you’ve absolute destroyed your knee here. I can’t even find the quadriceps tendon and there are bits of bone that have been pulled off your patella floating up your thigh! You’re definitely having surgery to repair this and I’m going to get my boss to review this as they will want to have the best images possible before you go into surgery.
I queried back “Hang on, they took an x-ray last week. If there are bits of patella in my thigh, surely that would have shown up on that x-ray?” The sonographer looked a bit firm and said “yes, if the doctors had read the report they would have known this, but perhaps they just looked to see if the patella had been shattered and when they saw it was not, they moved on.”
I was wheeled back down to orthopaedics and the registrar confirmed I’d be having surgery likely on Monday, but the hospital would ring me to confirm. Shortly after I got home I received a call asking if I could be back at the hospital by 7am as I was going to be first on the surgical list the following day. I was very keen to get my knee fixed, so that was a quick “yes” from me!
Surgery 1
I’ve had a few surgeries previously, I ruptured my left Achilles tendon playing basketball when I was 23yrs old and had a major left knee surgery in 2014, and a meniscus tear repair on my right knee in 2022 and the feeling of getting prepped for surgery is always a strange one. There is the visit from the anaesthetist and consent, the warm blankets, the “nil-by-mouth” from the night before and usually a visit from the surgeon to mark the limb getting surgery. Oddly, in this case, I didn’t meet the surgeon before the surgery, but it was not long before I was being wheeled into the theatre, shuffled across to the surgical table, a line put in and then the mask on my mouth and told to count to ten …. and then nothing!
I woke up three hours later in the recovery ward with a friendly nurse assigned to monitor me as I came to. Whilst it did not feel it to me, I was in there for around five hours as I really struggled to get on top of the pain from the surgery. They started me on paracetamol and then progressively moved through the drugs as nothing was helping. I moved onto Codeine, Morphine, Oyxcodone (which had worked well on my previous left knee surgery post-op) but none of these were helping. Finally, the nurse went and made a call for permission to hook me up to a Fentanyl line with a Ketamine pump that I could push every five minutes for an additional top up of pain relief.
Wow – the combination of Fentanyl + Ketamine = heaven. Now I understand why America has an opioid crisis!
The Procedure Itself
It was only weeks later I learned what the surgeon had done. He cut from below my knee to half way up my quadricep. He used an electric surgical drill to drill three holes the length of my patella (from the top to bottom lengthwise). He then pulled my quadriceps back down, tied six surgical ‘strings’ to the quadriceps tendon, then threaded those strings through the three holes he had drilled and then knotted and tied them off at the bottom of my kneecap. He then stitched me all up again.
Here is a video (don’t watch if a bit squeamish – it’s age restricted since it has open surgery in it) which is very similar although in this case the strings were tied to a suture anchor embedded into the patella, whereas my surgeon drilled holes to the bottom of the patella meaning there was no foreign objects left in my knee.
With the pain finally under control I was relocated to a ward where I had my own room (amazing), my Fentanyl and Ketamine pump came with me, and I was in a semi-conscious state for the rest of the evening as my wife came to visit.
The hospital bed was pretty fancy, inflating/deflating in different parts to continuously change the pressure points on my body but honestly, I was out to it. I was being woken every hour by nurses to check my vitals because of the drugs I was on, a few times they asked me to take very large breaths to increase my oxygen levels as these drugs give you a very low respiration rate.
The following morning a pain specialist came in and explained to me that before I could be sent home I would need to be unhooked from the IV line of fentanyl and ketamine and would need to be able to manage my pain levels only with prescription medication like codeine or tramadol. An hour or so later I was unhooked from the IV (which was left in the corner of my room) and my pain levels which were at a very manageable 2/10 slowly started to increase over the course of the day.
By 3pm in the afternoon I was very uncomfortable with the pain really starting to be front and centre again, around a 7/10 and it was evident to me I could not leave like this without being extremely uncomfortable at home.
Whilst the nursing staff were great, the junior doctors were wanting to stick to the basic playbook which said I should be ready to go home. They would not give me morphine orally and would not hook me back up to the IV drip. Cutting a long story short, as my pain levels rose to 9/10 and I was finding it very hard to get comfortable my wife marched off to find the head nurse and managed to convince him to get approval to hook up the IV line again. With Fentanyl and Ketamine coursing back into my veins I was very quickly extremely comfortable and settled in for the night.
The following morning the pain specialist returned and said we needed to start the whole process again – this time it went fine, removing the IV line and taking oral medications my body was ok with the pain and by 5pm that afternoon I checked out with a new and improved leg brace and headed home with strict instructions to not weight bear for 10 weeks and not bend the knee.
On returning home other bruises from the accident were discovered and there was a lot of sitting on the couch and taking medication every four hours.
Rehab 1
The first few weeks at home were honestly a bit of a blur – I was taking tramadol, ibuprofen and paracetamol on a very regular schedule, even setting alarms every four hours throughout the night to keep on top of it. My knee was locked out dead straight in the brace and I could not place any weight on it, I could not get it wet, or shower easily. It was not a great time however I had amazing support from bosses at Cyclone (thanks guys!) and my wife Zohnia who went above and beyond to keep me as comfortable as she could. Having access to a downstairs bedroom and bathroom was amazing as I could not have got myself up and down stairs in those first few weeks.
Two weeks after the surgery I went to the hospital for an x-ray and to get the stitches out. I was not prepared for the view of my knee when the bandages were removed:
With a wound Frankenstein would be proud of, a friend of mine joked that I had a permanent Halloween costume on my leg!
Four weeks later I visited the surgeon again who took a look at my knee and ominously said:
It’s feeling quite “wooden” Sam – it’s time you go and see the physio and try to get this moving. You’ve got a lot of muscle wastage already which is to be expected but you’ll regain that easily. I think you’re going to need to work quite hard to regain that range of motion so get started.
The brace could be slowly moved to bend more and initially it added 10degrees, then two weeks later another 20 degrees but I was honestly struggling to get the knee to bend close to 30 degrees.
My poor physio started a lot of work to get my knee moving by relaxing the muscles with “needling” (inserting needles to stimulate the muscles), massaging, trying to bend it and even sending me off to do aqua jogging. I was trying to walk more independently and “normally” but one day I got an alert from my Apple Watch that warned me I was walking unsteadily – what an incredible device!
I could have a bit of a laugh about this, however I did think it was a great alert for perhaps an elderly person to take care in their walking and perhaps seek a cane or walking frame if needed.
From the 17th June to the 15th July I went to the pool 2-3x week trying to get my knee to bend with weighted steps and kicks in the pool but it really was not making much progress.
I was seeing progress in my ability to walk further distances on my crutches and slowly add some weight bearing into the process. In mid-July I drove myself 2km to the nearby Monavale Gardens one of my favourite spots and had a very slow 1.42km walk by myself. To have achieved this small feeling of independence was a big step forward for me 57 days after the accident.
However, when I saw the surgeon again in early July, he took one look at my leg and looked at me very seriously. He said:
Sam, your knee is not moving or bending anywhere near what it should be by this stage. I’m very concerned. I’m going to need to move towards a MUA. This is a “Manipulation Under Anaesthetic” – I will knock you out in surgery and basically try the following:
- Forcefully try to bend your knee as far as I can to regain normal range of motion. This requires a significant amount of force. I must be honest with you, there is a possibility I could re-rupture your tendon doing this MUA (my eyes started to water at this stage!)
- IF I re-ruptured your quadriceps tendon attempting the MUA, I’d need to open your knee up again and surgically repair it all over again.
- The third option is if I can’t bend your knee under the MUA and I don’t re-rupture your tendon in the process, then I’d need to cut you open along the same incision line and use a scalpel to cut away the scar tissue that is stopping your knee from bending properly.
We need to move fast on this Sam, I’ll ask ACC to fund this through my private practice – your knee needs to start bending immediately.
Feeling a bit shell-shocked at this news and horrified at the prospect I might be back at square one if my quadriceps tendon ruptured during the MUA, it was a very quiet ride home in the car with my wife.
I quickly came around to appreciate that my surgeon had been very decisive that action was required and that a plan was in place. My leg, whilst massively smaller than it had been, was still full of swelling and fluid as you can see from these two pics:
Fortunately, the approvals from ACC came through quickly and I was scheduled for a second surgery on the 17th July, 110 days after the accident.
Surgery 2
I must admit that whilst I put on a brave face ahead of the surgery I was experiencing significant trepidation. All I knew was that I would be knocked out under an anaesthetic and then would awake later to learn which of the three options had been required to fix my knee. This uncertainty was unnerving. I was not concerned about the skill of the surgeon or the surgery itself, but the idea of waking up and possibly learning I was right back at square one was a tough thing to get my head around.
I awoke from the surgery in the recovery ward with the usual hazy feelings as a nurse said “Sam, here’s an iceblock for you, have a few sucks as you wake up” and my eyes fluttered open, too dazed to really think to ask about what had happened to my knee. After a while I was feeling more awake and the surgeon walked in and said:
Sam, I could not get your knee to bend at all during the MUA. The good news is I didn’t re-rupture your tendon, the bad news is I had to cut you open again. There was a huge amount of scar tissue wrapped around the knee. I cut away as much as I could above and around your knee, but I could not remove the scarring below your knee. There are too many nerves and blood vessels there and the risk is too high. You will likely lose some range of motion in your knee, but with hard work you’ll get enough to get back to normal activities. I managed to bend your knee 120 degrees under anaesthetic – that’s your goal now.
With that, he was gone and with the pain in my knee increasing, the helpful nurse arrived and offered me Fentanyl, which I gratefully accepted. This time, however she gave me two separate shots of it over a period of time, rather than putting me on an IV line with additional ketamine. How to describe this feeling?
The best way I could describe it was almost immediately after getting the Fentanyl into my line, everything started to fade away. I knew I was in a hospital ward and I was vaguely aware there were other beds near me with patients in them, but it was like the length of the room had suddenly been stretched very, very wide. The other beds disappeared to the far end of the stretched ward and the voices went with them until they sounded only like a distant burble that barely bothered me. My pain disappeared and whilst I was definitely ‘awake’ I had no sense of the passage of time, no interest in really engaging with anything, and if a nurse did ask me a question, it was an absolute effort to concentrate and try to reply. I’m not a drug user, but I can honestly say this was not an unpleasant experience!
I was taken to a ward where the nurses fetched a “continuous motion” machine that my leg was strapped to and this was going to start bending my leg for me, with an ever-increasing range of motion over the night.
Still pretty high on Fentanyl, I tried to eat having been nil-by-mouth since the night before and promptly did two very large vomits. I know nausea and vomiting are common side effects of general anaesthetics but I’ve been fortunate to never experience that from my previous surgeries. The nurses were very gracious and helped clean up!
I did have an oozing wound where the stitches were tied off but being exhausted I was soon fast asleep as my knee was automatically bent further and further throughout the night:
There was only one remaining tale to tell from this hospital visit: the night nurse was keen to ensure that I was able to pee ok. Despite having drunk water I was not feeling the urge at all, but she continued to prompt me. After various attempts sitting with a bed pan, standing with a bed pan, going to the bathroom with running water in the sink to ‘encourage me’ I still could not pee.
A few hours later the nurse issued an ultimatum to me:
Sam, if you’ve not peed before 6am I’ll need to insert a catheter as we can’t send you home not able to urinate.
In fairness to the nurse, I’m sure she was looking forward to that prospect about as much as I was (i.e. zero!) so I tried one more time and squeezed out the smallest pee ever but enough to truthfully tell her I had peed and could safely go home!
The surgeon appeared mid-morning, told me he had cut away some of my quadriceps muscle which was dead and he described it as “like a clump of tissue stuck limply to your femur”, reiterated there had been a lot of scar tissue, and then encouraged me to get moving as much as possible and not let anything slow me down. With that, I was discharged by early afternoon with a new prescription for more drugs and a real sense that if I did not take advantage of this second surgery and get this knee moving I may never be able to ride a bike again.
Rehab 2
It was amazing how less invasive this second surgery felt – even though he’d cut me open again, since there was no interfering with the bone the pain was dramatically less this time around.
I was really happy with how much mobility I possessed so quickly after this surgery, although only four days later my knee started to get very hot and red and I was concerned I may have an infection so ended up getting it checked out in A&E. They took the bandages off and I could see the new incision for the first time:
The bottom of the wound was still weeping, and even though I was not feeling great, the team decided I didn’t have an infection and sent me home. I started to feel ok the following day. The wound oozed for another week or more before my wife decided to dig around with her dental zoom lens glasses on and discovered a suture stuck in the wound that was obviously aggravating it and preventing it from healing over. She got some tweezers and extracted it and the wound closed up in a few days time.
On the 11th August, three weeks after the second surgery and 135 days after the accident I was able to ‘ride’ my eBike up the driveway and pedal 4-5x with a very stiff knee. It was painful, it was ugly, but it was progress and I was going to hold on to that.
Every few days after that I would try and bike a little more, forcing the knee to bend (it was very unwilling). My original physio had give me some pedals for use under a desk or sitting on the couch but prior to the second surgery I could not bend my knee enough to use them. I started to use them multiple times a day now and the knee continued to bend more:
It felt amazing to be getting the knee bending like this and by the 2nd September, 157 days from the accident, I rode my gravel bike (no e-Assist) for the first time on a slow and ponderous 14km. My knee ballooned up immediately afterwards but nevertheless it felt incredible!
My physio after the first surgery had headed overseas so I was assigned a new one at the same practice and we soon clicked and she’s been excellent motivating me and helping my knee move and strengthen. I was super keen to get sign off from the surgeon because I had a work trip to Malta departing on the 15th September that I really wanted to be on. Fortunately, by the 9th of September my knee was feeling good enough to be able to return to work 40hrs/week (164 days after the accident) and I was declared fit to travel half way around the world.
By this stage, I could tentatively ride my eBike to work which felt great:
I was getting quite a lot of fluid on my knee cap which my physio explained was because the patellofemoral joint was having to overwork to support me because my left quad was still too weak. My friend called it quite accurately “waterbed knee”
Malta and Spain
Heading to Malta for 4.5 days from New Zealand is mad by anyone’s standards, but triply so with a knee like mine. I decided to extend the trip with an extra week in Spain and take Zohnia with me. When I was in Malta “working” she’d visit some Italian friends of ours living in the Canary islands. It was a blissful couple of weeks.
My knee got a bit angry a few times and I took more codeine that I’d have preferred but we saw and experienced some amazing sights and sounds. Here is a very small selection of photos:
Malta
Spain (Madrid & Barcelona)
One of the absolute highlights was catching the metro to the home of Real Madrid football team at Santiago Bernabéu Stadium and watching them play. They won 4:1 and it was an incredible experience amid 85,000 fans!
On our first day in Barcelona my knee finally gave up and I needed to take an extended rest – fortunately it did bounce back ok after that
The Road Ahead
Returning from Europe, it was time to get down to business and start actively strengthening my knee. I checked in with my physio and she did a strength test of my left quad that showed it had only 43% of the strength of my right quad, so we started meeting weekly in the gym to build up that strength.
After a month of the gym another strength test showed my left leg was closer to 61% the strength of my right leg (even though my right had also increased by 9%) so it was evidently working.
I am now able to ride my eBike each day the 10km return trip to the office, and I got onto my Zwift indoor trainer and started a few rides trying to output some more power. I even splashed out on the in-game purchase and got the latest Canyon Aeroad 2024 bike in Zwift:
After visiting some friends in Cust, I jumped out at Rangiora and biked the 30km home from there on the cycleway that follows the northern motorway. This was the longest unassisted bike ride I’d done since the accident, a full 204 days later:
It was not fast, it was not glamorous, it was a bit painful, but it was wonderful – I was getting back to what I love doing over 200 days since the accident.
Which leads me back to the very start of this post and the reason why I wrote it. 218 days after my accident I got back on my road bike for the first time and did a slightly abbreviated version of my favourite beach loop ride. It was a lovely Spring morning, blue skies, cool and crisp, limited wind and as I rode I reflected on all the hard times I’d had over the previous eight months
Throughout this journey there were times I wondered if I’d ever walk normally again, let alone ride my bikes. The pain was so great, the knee was so rigidly inflexible, and a ‘normal’ future seemed so distant that I wondered how I’d get there. Yet, through all of that the support I received was incredible: from my wife, family, friends, physio, boss and colleagues. I was extended infinite patience, grace and support and this truly made all the difference. I also kept a vision and a goal that I would one day get back on my road bike and pedal myself to the sea and that would represent a major milestone in my rehabilitation.
I am proud of achieving that this week.
Getting back into my pink socks and road bike shoes felt a bit strange and my knee matched the strangeness nicely, but I didn’t care – I’d done it.
The Road Still Rises Before Me
Both literally and metaphorically, the road rises before me. The allure of getting back on my bike and bikepacking to cool places calls to me and the journey of continuing my physical rehabilitation is ever present. In fact, since starting writing this blog a few days ago my knee has had a few setbacks as I’ve over done the exercise, getting too ambitious on the activity loads causing swelling and fluid to return.
You learn a lot about yourself through an injury like this and I expect it will likely be a full 12 months before I no longer think about my knee being injured, or stiff and painful in the mornings. I am frequently grateful that this is knee injury is all I suffered. One month after my first surgery I read this story of an Auckland mum who fell off riding her bike with her husband and two kids and was paralysed. Friends asked me if I’d ever dare get back on a bike again and seemed shocked when I told them I could not wait to ride again. We should all be thankful for the blessings we have in our lives.
For now, I keep moving forward, one pedal stroke at a time.
