Total distance ridden in October was almost exactly 300km (300.07 if you want to be really picky) The breakdown is pretty easy for last month, only 2 outdoor rides the first of which was the second day of my Mallorca odyssey which you can read about in the previous post, then one other just under 50km loop on the Moulton round my local lanes a few days after I got home. All the rest of the riding was clocked up indoors on the Zwift Ride.

So why such a boring month especially after such a promising start? well its pretty simple really – my right shoulder which has been annoying me for the last few months has just got steadily worse to the point where riding the mountain bike is now just too painful. The roadbike is ok, the narrower hand and arm position seems to make the discomfort much more manageable so long as I’m careful not to jolt the arm too much or make any sudden shoulder movements but I’ve been very conscious that falling off at the moment would probably be a very bad and painful idea if I ended up landing on my righthand side.

Realising this problem wasn’t responding to my usual prescription for physical ailments (doing my best to ignore it till it goes away by itself) I resigned myself to seeking help from the medical fraternity. So the last few weeks have seen me being poked and prodded by a physiotherapist which didn’t seem to help and he couldn’t decide between a frozen shoulder (apparently thats an actual medical condition, not just going out without a coat on one side), torn rotator cuff or bursitis in the joint. Then I had an ultrasound scan which apparently showed I’d torn two out of my three deltoid muscles, rest and gentle stretching was prescribed which didn’t help either. By this time my shoulder movement was so restricted my wife was calling me ‘T rex arm’ and playfully asking me to get her things from high shelves and cupboards ……..

After the physiotherapist admitted defeat I was sent off to the local private hospital (thank goodness for the company sponsored private healthcare scheme) to meet with a stern looking Consultant with lots of letters after his name and to get fed into their very expensive MRI scanner. Afterwards he rather breezily (I thought) told me I was a very simple case and he saw lots of this sort of thing in men my age from predominately careers involving manual labour. Basically I’ve worn out my right shoulder. The bones especially the end of my collarbone were all knobbly and worn and the joint was out of line somehow and it was now pressing on the tendons that connect my biceps muscle to the rest of me, making said tendons very inflamed and unhappy. I’ve had a very unpleasant steroid injection into the inflamed tendons to try and calm them down a bit (doesn’t seem to be working so far) but he was pretty sure I had an appointment with his scalpels and bone files in my future 🤨

So that’s a bit of a downer, but looking on the bright side if I’ve got to have the surgery and some time of the bike its better done over the winter than the summer I suppose…….