I thought it might be a nice idea to write a quick update on my knee and the way it’s going after my last blog about the overuse injury.
After a lot of reading and researching through various books, ebooks, and other such things, it was evident that the issue was not, as most people assume, to do with the knee. As previously mentioned, the knee can’t really do much wrong in and of itself unless you hit it with or against something hard and solid. I certainly did not do that, so the injury had to be a chronic condition. Knees don’t just suddenly hurt out of the blue without good reason, and that reason is generally because the hip or the ankle is doing something sub-optimal.
After a few self-administered tests it was pretty obvious that it was my hips that were the issue. Very stiff, and very inflexible. They have been for most of my life. That, however, is no excuse.
It’s now 3 weeks, going on 4 since the High Peak Marathon when the pain came on. During the first week, I did not run. Tell a lie, I ran once, went to the gym twice, and spent most of what time I would have been running either stretching my hip flexors (psoas, iliacus, rectus femoris), or foam rollering all the muscles in and around my thighs and hamstrings. I also concentrated a lot on rollering through the glutes – max and med.
I won’t lie it wasn’t pleasant, but I’d rather be in pain for a while on my living room floor than out on the hill a few miles from home and having to stumble my way back.
The second week I started cycling on the turbo, a couple of hours easy stuff and a session of hard intervals. I also went out on a short run. During this week I also continued to work hard with the roller, (it was getting easier by this point, but there were still a few really quite painful areas).
Last Sunday I went out for an easy run to see how things were, and ended up going 23km with minimal pain, I kept the pace easy, and didn’t over do things.
This week I was out running with the club, as well as a short run in the morning, and have continued rollering and going to the gym.
On Sunday I’m doing Edale Skyline, 21 miles of bog trotting and trail running. Again, I’m going to be taking it pretty easy, and certainly won’t be racing around, but I will be out running, and my knee shouldn’t be bothering me. I’ll write a race report afterward and will post up a link to that as well.
I suppose the main thing I want to point out is that if you have a knee injury, don’t try and run through it. The reason your knee hurts (unless you’ve hit it) is because of a biomechanical imbalance somewhere else in the body. Fundamentally if you don’t sort that out, you probably won’t get rid of the knee pain. I was only away from running for 1.5 weeks. Ok, I missed a race, but hey, there will be another race some other time.
Be sensible. Get it looked at, work out what is CAUSING the pain, sort it out, get back running again. You DON’T have to be out because of knee injuries for months on end. If running means that much to you, get it sorted so that you don’t have to moan and bitch to your running mates that you can’t run.