Weekly Newsletter: March 18th-24th, 2024

This week, we enjoyed some excellent home cooking as well as one of our favorite local restaurants. We also took on our first Spring hike together and Keith may have found the root cause of his knee pain! 🤞

Check out our new posts and videos 🆕 🎥 📝

Utah Adventures With A Friend: Part 1

Yi visits us in Utah to hike, bike, and adventure. This is part 1 of the multi-part series.

Keith and LindseyLindsey Huster

Lindsey's home cooking 🧆 😋

Lindsey is such a great cook! This week, she made a delicious teriyaki-style meatloaf with pineapple. Lindsey found this recipe in the Feeding the Frasers cookbook.

Feeding the Frasers

Sammy Moniz is well known in the CrossFit community as an activist, and she is also the wife of five-time champion Mat Fraser, the winningest athlete in CrossFit history and one of the most beloved.

This is her cookbook where she shares the secrets behind feeding the greatest champion of the sport.

Buy on Amazon

The meatloaf was so moist on the inside yet still had that yummy outer crust. The teriyaki flavor was a nice departure from the traditional ketchup-based meatloaf and the pineapple brought the acid that such a heavy meal often needs. We gave this recipe two solid thumbs up! 👍 👍

Hiking the Top of the "Y" trail 🥾 🏔️

Keith's knee is starting to feel a lot better so we decided to give it a proper test by hiking the Top of the "Y" Trail in Provo, UT. This trail is more or less a gravel road that wiggles its way up the side of the Y mountain. The trail gains nearly 1,100 vertical feet (335 meters) over the course of one mile (1.6 kilometers) so it is quite steep.

The pitch is managed through a set of 13 switchbacks that take you to the top of the enormous concrete "Y". There is also a stopping point at the 10th switchback which leaves you at the bottom of the "Y". This trail is a local favorite of the Provo community and BYU college students.

Keith had not hiked this trail in several years so he was excited to revisit it. Lindsey had been using this trail as a means of morning exercise so she was familiar with it. The hike up was intense as it immediately starts ascending the mountain face and doesn't let up until you have reached the "Y". We made it to the top of the Y in good time thanks to the cool weather. Also, Keith's knee didn't bother him at all during the entire ascent. This was a great sign!

However, the hike back down did give Keith a small amount of knee pain. This was expected though as the steep pitch and extended descent put a lot of strain on your knees, even when they are fully healthy. Overall, Keith felt like his knee is healing well but he still needs to give it more time to fully recover.

Our favorite ramen and a new dessert shop 🍜 🍰

For date night this week, we visited our favorite local ramen shop; Haku Ramen House. This restaurant is a hidden gem of American Fork, UT. The unassuming, quaint restaurant serves incredible homemade ramen bowls, an assortment of sushi, and some of the best Chashu BBQ Pork Buns that we have ever tasted!

After dinner, we decided to splurge and check out a new-to-us local dessert shop called Dipp'd Desserts. The concept of this place is so simple yet so incredibly decadent and delicious. They offer either a frozen banana, ice cream bar or frozen cheesecake that is then dipped and drizzled in an assortment of chocolates. The dessert is then topped with even more chocolate, berries, etc.

Lindsey ordered the Raspberry Chocolate Cheesecake and Keith ordered the Coconut Almond Ice Cream Bar. Both were top-notch in terms of taste and presentation. We both left feeling very satisfied.

No skiing this week 🎿 😔

Due to Keith's ongoing bought with knee pain, we decided not to ski this week. Instead, we decided to enjoy a weekend of sitting at home and catching up on some much-needed sleep and relaxation. Unfortunately, this did mean that we missed a late-season powder day as 1-2 feet (0.3-0.6 meters) of snow had fallen at Snowbird.

Tour Divide training update 🏋️‍♂️ 😅

Keith is still recovering from what he believes is a slight case of Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome which started a couple of weeks ago. He experienced similar pain many years ago when he first started road cycling in Indiana. However, even with all of his training this year he has yet to experience any such pain until recently. He knew that something had changed to trigger this pain but it was unclear what change may have occurred. It could have been a change in training load, training volume, skiing + cycling, etc. There are just so many variables that it is difficult to track down a root cause.

Keith had taken the last week or so off of the bike to give his knee time to heal. In the meantime, he has been focused on taking walks and working on strength and mobility workouts to address any potential muscle weakness or tightness that may have been impacting his knee. Specifically, he has been using the free Dynamic Cyclist routines on YouTube. These are a great source of simple yet effective cyclist-specific workouts aimed at treating and preventing common injuries that cyclists face.

Eventually, Keith felt that he was ready to test out cycling again. So, he planned a low-power (125-175 watt) 30-60 minute ride on his Stages SB20 Smart Bike indoor trainer. The ride started out great; no knee pain at all and overall felt comfortable. However, at about the 30-minute mark that all too familiar knee pain started occurring again. Keith immediately stopped as he knew something wasn't right. There was no reason that riding at such a low power should trigger this knee pain. So, he began investigating the bike itself to see if something had changed.

Keith knew that the pain was initially felt after an intense indoor Zwift workout. However, it also followed him during an outdoor ride later that same week so he had initially ruled out any sort of equipment-specific issue. It turns out that was a bad assumption! While inspecting his indoor bike, Keith discovered that his seat post needed to be raised almost 30 millimeters in order to give his leg proper extension on the downstroke. The seatpost must have slowly slipped down over time until it reached a point that triggered this knee pain!

The fact that the saddle height was so low could definitely be the contributing factor to Keith's knee pain. A saddle that is too low will put extra force on the front of the kneecap as the leg doesn't have the ability to reach proper extension to distribute the workload between the quadricep (front of the leg) and hamstring (rear of the leg) muscles. This overloading of the kneecap can result in inflammation of the patellar tendon thus leading to Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome.

Now that Keith has resolved this saddle height issue, he is keeping his fingers crossed that his knee pain will fully heal over the next couple of weeks.

Upcoming posts and videos 👷‍ 👷‍♀️️

Lindsey is working her way through the series of posts covering our friend Yi's visit to Utah last summer. Be sure to subscribe to our blog so that you don't miss out. Keith has been extra-focused on recovery efforts so he is unsure when he will be able to work on the posts from our Las Vegas trip. 🥺

We hope that you are enjoying our newsletters. Have you ever experienced Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome or anything similar? What helped you recover and get back to sports? Let us know in the comments section below.👇 💬