I am the OP (DOB 1949) on this thread. I thought that I would update things in case someone down the road is doing research and stumbles into this thread.
In summary, I ran into sudden hip discomfort that did not affect my biking but was a big problem climbing stairs, I could not swing a golf club, and it sometimes just hurt. It was diagnosed as tendonitis of the gluteus medius (hip) and after the 4th week of a planned 6 weeks of PT, it was obviously worse. At that point an MRI revealed no hip issues of any consequence, but 'severe' spinal stenosis, foraminal stenosis, and a foraminal cyst. So it was off to the back doctor. You are now caught up with the thread :-)
Treatment started out as a spinal epidural plus some additional (somewhat different) PT. I don't think the PT was helpful other than possibly (if I keep it up) slowing down the inevitable degradation of this condition. However, a week after the spinal epidural I was roughly 90% pain free. Golf was not a problem although I did not risk walking and carrying my 25 pounds of golf stuff (which I had been doing pain free until Feb. 23 when this just hit me out of the blue). Biking had been and continued to be actually helpful - hip always felt better after a ride.
The epidural was in early May and by late June some of the pain symptoms began to return. The doctor was willing to repeat the epidural after 3 months, but from what I can determine repeated epidurals tend to lose effectiveness. I kind of arbitrarily set a personal target of 6 months between epidurals. Things just slowly kept going downhill from that point when about a month ago I had 4 REALLY good days out of the blue (where the heck did that come from) and since then the pain has kind of stabilized at the level it was at in late July (which is irritating but I can tolerate it and can still play golf out of a cart). So for now I am on track for getting to 6 months before my next epidural (that would be early Nov - wonderful birthday present to myself). And bike rides continue to be therapeutic - hip NEVER hurts after a bike ride.
And golf is interesting. I can now swing a golf club (which I could NOT do prior to the epidural) but cannot take more than maybe 20 consecutive full swings without sitting down for a couple of minutes - and then I am limited to about 10 consecutive swings before I have to sit again. Of course playing golf out of a cart (I MUCH preferred walking and carrying my bag, BTW) lends itself nicely to those necessary short periods of sitting (this sitting requirement is very common in spinal stenosis). But there are times when the natural rest periods in a round of golf are inadequate and, for example, I might look at the 60 uphill yards from the green to the cart and think "am I going to be able to do that?". So far I have been able to do that but there have been a couple of times where I was close to sitting out a hole just for some extra relief.
So that is where things stand. Once I get to the point where I need epidurals more often than every three months, start to feel lower body tingling or numbness, or I can't walk a couple hundred yards at a time then there will be serious discussion about surgical solutions (probably requiring some spinal roto-rooting in my case).
Just an update.
dave