All right then..
..I suppose I should either go ahead and change the name of this blog to “Ow My Knee Hurts” or else find something else to write about. The thing is, when your knee hurts this much, it commands a lot of your attention.
It’s my own fault. With the knee injury I just got over, I was really careful (at least after awhile) about cutting back on both my running distance and speed. After several weeks of running no more than three miles at a time, at a nice easy pace, the knee felt perfectly healed, but I was getting increasingly impatient about not running faster and farther. The rest of my body was definitely wanting more of a workout. For about a week or so after the knee had improved, I experimented carefully with adding distance and speed. I did a four- and then a five-mile run, and generally increased my pace to 10 min/mile (or a little faster on three milers). The knee felt all right through all of this.
So then but anyway, since everything seemed to be feeling so good, last Thursday afternoon I decided to see just how close I could come to hitting my current medium-term goal of finishing six miles in an hour or less. I managed to run the six in 62 minutes. This was an exciting result, nearly to my goal and more than 10 minutes off my previous best over that distance. But I seem to have injured my knee in a new and completely different way in the process. It’s nothing tragic, just some irritating soreness, but I’m back to cross training and regular doses of ibuprofen for the foreseeable future.
I think like a lot of people I tend to hurt myself in this way because I’m not used to what it feels like to give yourself an overuse injury. I’m not a masochist at all, and I know enough to stop if something really starts hurting abruptly. But this knee stuff never seems to hurt has much while I’m running as it does a little while afterwards. Even though I’m limping around today just trying to walk around the office, I bet if I could go push myself through a mile on the track right now, then I could probably run a couple more miles relatively pain-free. Not that I’m going to go try this, of course. I’m really just writing this as a reminder to myself to take it easy, and more importantly to continue to pace myself, even after the knee feels better again. Which I have no doubt it will if I take care of it.
10:34 | 0 Comments