Knee Pain

With the Monument Avenue 10K only 8 days away, I am not doing great for it. There have been a lot of obstacles for completing this race, starting with the foot surgery two months ago, and three moderately bad colds in the same period of time. The surgery knocked out any training for about five weeks. I'd run twice since then when the last and worst of the colds kicked my butt for two weeks. I started running again last week, fighting through a migraine. Then I did 5.6 miles Sunday at Deep Run Park, and was feeling pretty good. My right knee started hurting a bit the next day.

Tuesday, I ran and walked about four miles after work Tuesday with my friend, Lelia. My knee has hurt continually since. I think what is happening is I have done too much too fast. The cold messed up starting to get back slowly into running, and I felt like I had to make up for lost time. I looked at the amount of time before the race, and I know I told myself that it was only a 10K and to press on because I was short on time. So having run or even walked fast no more than a few times in 8 weeks, I just went out and did 5.6 miles. My leg strength and general physical condition allowed it to happen, but it was too much right now, and my knee is telling me that.

So while I can still walk fine if I don't press it, any motion - especially going up and down stairs - causes a fair amount of pain. I am going to try the eliptical machine Sunday and see how that feels. If there are no problems and my knee feels better, I am going to try running Wednesday. On race day, I will do the best I can. Maybe the best I can do is a less than full speed walk.

In the meantime, I am going to review all of my Team in Training injury prevention material and see if I can figure out what I did to myself - and what to do about it going forward.