Maintaining a reasonable level of cycling fitness/ability is not all that hard. It really boils down to riding around 4 times a week and not putting on, say, 30kg.

I didn’t manage to crack either of those two simple steps. For various reasons, including the lockdown of 2020, But primarily

• Four years of working from home with an ever expanding butt welded to the office chair, and
• consequential damage from my Achilles separation (March 2018) to my peroneus longus and brevis tendons keeping me off the bike. Even walking was painful

After an extended and painful recovery from the Achilles, I was avoiding surgery and was crossing fingers that the peroneus tendons would miraculously sort themselves out. But three years later they were, if anything, worsening.

Skip forward 2023 and Michael getting into MTB riding and wanting to do a Wines to Whales with me made me realize that simple hope over experience was not helping. I decided to take action.

April 2023 – a well recommended orthopod lopped off and removed a section of the damaged longus and repaired the damaged brevis. And for good measure lopped a wedge out of my heel bone (calcanus) to straighten up the heel bone to reduce the pressure on the peroneus tendons. Or rather, the remaining peroneus tendon. For those with any medical leaning – a Dwyer osteotomy.

Time traveling back to grade 10, I helped my dad repair a small outboard engine that’s had ended up submerged (yes, he flipped the tender). After reassembly we had two washers, a nut and a curved flange plate left over. The washers were innocuous , but the nut and plate were concerning. Wherever they were meant to go, was a mystery and clearly an over engineered solution. That little 4hp motor ran just fine without them. Probably the first time that I remember thinking that the original design could be improved at home.

Years later, my brother and I rebuilt a 1967 Landrover engine – the original 4 cylinder petrol motor. We were able to optimize that design too and had a decent collection of bits and bobs that the original engineer hasn’t realized were superfluous! I was by then a qualified engineer with a masters. Okay, high frequency electronic engineer, so my mechanical insights were a bit sketchy but still I felt qualified to declare that we had optimized the original design. And it served me well for a number of trips north of South Africa.

The point of that detour was that I clearly had a top notch orthopedic specialist. He optimized my original design and had a left over bit of superfluous tendon after the op!

I did search for a photo of a healthy tendon, but Google didn’t oblige.

The heel bone adjustment. Ew

After recovery and some rehab I manage to eventually get it together to start riding again and eat healthily. At time of writing I am about half way through the 30kg problem and about half way on the riding fitness problem.

Which leads us to a two coke story in the next post….