Road to Recovery

  Nothing but good news today.  As you know, I devoted this week to trying to rehab my knee since it flared up on me after my long run this past Sunday.  I was pretty worried since I was having some pretty significant discomfort on the lateral side of my left knee on Monday.  The pain was at its worst walking down stairs, and I had to go one step at a time.  Ever since the knee starting acting up, I have been trying to figure out exactly what caused the injury.  In hindsight, I have come up with a few things that likely contributed:

   1 -  Shoes - I think I made a mistake when I decided to go with my old shoes for my last two long runs.  I did it to try to be proactive since the left shoe was starting to irritate the top of my foot.  In hindsight, I think that this decision may have contributed to my knee problem since my old shoes don't quite have the support that the newer ones do.
   2 -  Weak Quads - As I mentioned before I think that the knee pain I am having is likely from patellofemoral syndrome.  The etiology of this is likely from weak leg muscles.  I think my mistake was that I was too focused on the running aspect of my training, and didn't devote enough time to strength training.  As of this week, I have started some strength exercises to improve my quad & hamstring strength to hopefully those will help.
   3 - Poor Flexibility - After doing some reading, I also found out that improper stretching may predispose you to knee injuries as well.  I think that as my mileage has gone up, I have failed to devote appropriate time to stretching / warming up.  Normally, I spend a quick 10 minutes before my run to do some quick and easy stretching.  From this point on, I am going to be devoting more time to my warmups

   The good news of today is that my knee is almost back to 100%.  With some intense stretching & strength training over the past three days, my knee feels great.  I am walking up and down stairs without difficulty and am looking forward to getting back on the road.  I know that I said I was going to take 2 weeks off, but if I feel this good tomorrow I am probably going to try a short 2-3 mile run to test out the knee.  I am glad that I have to work this Sunday because if I didn't I would probably try to do our long run again. 

   82 more days until April 18th ....