I pride myself on “never getting injured”. By that I mean, I’ve never had to stand down from training for any prolonged time due to over use or acute strain injuries. (Of course, there was that one time when I decided to find out what the tailgate of a pick-up tastes like…”
There are several elements which have protected me. First, my leg joints are fairly sturdy. Part of that is genetics, and part of that is all the breast-stroke frog kicking and downhill skiing I did as a youth. Second, I’ve done a lot of weight lifting over the years, and kept up swimming thru all my adult life. Third, I pay close attention to any little twinge or ache which crops up during or after exercise. Fourth, I’m willing to stand down for a day or two when I sense things starting to unravel inside. Finally, and this is the secret sauce, I’ve learned that after a few days rest, almost any injury will actually do better when faced with continued work. As someone once told me, “Exercise is medicine.”
I had been feeling a little twinge in my left knee starting about 6 days ago. By Saturday, I noticed the pain was most acute when I tried to walk up and down stairs. I cut short my bike trainer workout that day when my left hamstring started feeling sore. By Sunday, when I ran down the driveway to start my 9 mile run, the knee hurt, and kept hurting during the first 1/4 mile of my arm-up. So I pulled up, walked back home, and started to re-hab.
Neoprene brace around the knee. Commitment to not run again until Wednesday. No weight lifting until things improved. Etc.
After a self-enforced 96 hours in running jail, I tried my knee out on a cushy rubberized outdoor track at a local college. When I tried to run on Sunday, I felt persistent pain under my left knee cap, slightly to the left of center. I hadn’t felt the pain on the bike, nor lifting weights. It could have been caused by any of a number of things which have been introduced into my running in the previous ten days:
- a 5k race, then, six days later, 3 x 1 mi at 5K pace (6:57 min/mile)
- Using a treadmill at a 1% incline instead of the 0.5% I usually use.
- Weekly Uphill bounds
- Increasing weight on the sled, moving from 180# to 380# over a one month stretch (what I do annually in Dec/Jan in prep for skiing)
I decided to eliminate all of those possible offenders and do my intervals on the track. The plan was 3 x 1 mi (4′ easy jogging) at a 10K pace. I have a 10K race coming in 1.5 weeks, and I wanted to train specifically for that. That made the target pace 7:20 min/mi. The result: 7:18, 19, 08. Total of 7 miles/60 minutes. There was a twinge in my knee until the middle of the first interval; that was replaced by a twinge in my left hamstring until the end of the workout. I wondered if there is some slight deviance in my usual gait somehow causing this, so I paid more attention to glute firing and toe placement. I’ll see tomorrow and Friday if my knee tolerated the workout, but for now, I’m still not freaking out. This evening, I;m walking up and down stairs with less pain than any time in the last week. But I’m not going to lift any more heavy weights!