So this week didn't go as well as I had hoped. After the long run this past Sunday, I felt great ... mentally. I was elated with the fact that I had accomplished a couple huge goals - 1) I was able to run on one of L Street long runs with their running club, 2) I ran the distance of a half marathon. Unfortunately, what I originally thought was just normal post-run soreness turned out to be a little bit more. Like I said in one of my last posts, I has having some pain in my left knee. After doing a little bit of thinking, I realized that I likely was suffering from patellofemoral ... an overuse syndrome that leads to inflammation in the tissue below the knee cap. Its normally due to the quadriceps not being strong enough during the runs which leads to movement of the knee cap.
I thought that the discomfort would go to way after a night of icing, but unfortunately it didn't. I decided to take Monday off and didn't try to exercise again until Tuesday when I went to the gym. As there was a big snow storm on on Tuesday, I was planning on doing a 3-4 mile run on the treadmill. I did my stretching and hopped on the treadmill. I started slow by walking 1/4 mile before I took off on a medium pace jog. Within 30 seconds of running, I started having pretty bad pain on the outside of the knee cap. I tried to run through it but it continued to hurt. I decided to play it safe and not push it. Instead I hopped on the elliptical and was able to rock out 30 good minutes on that. For the rest of the day, I was barely able to walk down stairs because the pain in my knee was that bad.
Since that point I have been pretty conservative with the knee. I decided to rest it up for the remainder of the week. I have been icing the knee ~3 times per day for 30-40 minutes each time, taking Motrin 2-3 times per day to cut the inflammation and just resting it. It seems to have worked as the knee feels great right now. The plan from here is to try to do another run tomorrow morning with L Street. Unfortunately, I don't want to try to do the full 14 mile course since I know it will flare up the knee again. Instead, I am going to try to do a 7 mile run. In addition to the running, I am also going to need to hit the P90 workouts this week as well to try to strengthen my quads to prevent the knee issues from continuing.
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