Well, here is the next chapter of the story. Sporadic hip pain led to the diagnosis of tendonitis in the gluteus medius. 3 weeks of physical therapy caused a significant degradation of my condition (I say caused because immediately after we started a certain type of PT strengthening work, pain increased and I never recovered from that).
Back to the orthopedic doc and we did an MRI of the back and hip and I got my review with the orthpedic doc today. I have pretty much nothing going on in the hip but a whole bunch of severe arthritic narrowing of both the main canal and foraminal openings between L3 and L5 (lumbar) plus a cyst in that area that all correlate exactly with the pain. So I am now under the care of 'the spine team' at Pinehurst Surgical and will be getting an epidural tomorrow and I have my first formal meeting with 'the spine team' team week. So far no one has told me that I cannot ride, so that is at least a positive. There is probably back surgery in my future but maybe not now.
I have written out 'my definition of success' and we'll see what 'the spine team' says about that. FWIW, I am trying to be reasonable here so I took 'set a world record in the dead lift' out of my definition of success
dave