A Very Odd Injury

I delayed writing a week in review post not for any bad reason, but because I wanted to have enough time to fully go through the last four or five days because it's been pretty mystifying from this sore knee standpoint.

So, my general plan had been to to rest on Thursday and then do an easy 5 miles on Friday. On Thursday, the knee felt OK. Only the occasional bruised feeling and only at seemingly random times. In other words, it might twinge when I went up the steps, but not down. And then I'd go up the steps again and it'd feel fine, but then twinge when I was walking on flat ground. There was just no predictability, but I would say the discomfort was at most a 2 out of 10, so I thought I'd likely be able to run on Friday.

But then I woke up Friday morning and it just didn't feel great at all. Not like I couldn't walk on it or put weight on it, but it just didn't feel good. The twinges of discomfort were a bit more frequent, even though I hadn't done any physical activity on Thursday to aggravate it. It really didn't feel much better after I got home from work but again, discomfort probably 2 out of 10, so not bad. Just worrying, I guess. I was worried that running on it would make it much worse and risked something that would prevent me from running for a week or longer. So, I decided to take another rest day and I put some ice on it, etc.

I woke up on Saturday and it felt better, but still not 100%. Far fewer periods of discomfort but I just didn't feel totally confident. But, by the afternoon, I decided to head out for a very easy 4 miler with the intention of keeping it very slow and turning around or even walking back home if I felt significant or sustained pain.

But, it really didn't feel bad at all on the run and I made it the full 4 miles at a leisurely pace. There were maybe 3 or 4 times when I felt a bit of
discomfort, but they were seemingly at random: twice on flat ground, twice on downhills, but only briefly. And again, never really "painful" in the same way runner's knee is...a dull bruised feeling rather than the sharp pain of runner's knee, etc. There was a bit of pain after I got back the knee tightened back up, so I iced it a bit and that seemed to help.

So I was left wondering just what the hell was going on.

I woke up on Sunday and the knee felt better than it had since Tuesday. Still some twinges, but not bad. So, I kept to my plan of a 7.5 mile very easy, no pressure longer run that would go over to Fells Point, then up through Butcher's Hill and into Patterson Park before turning back to Canton and back home. My intent was to run a route with some uphills and downhills to test the knee. I wanted to keep the pace around 10:00 per mile, give or take 15 seconds, and I was successful: my Garmin clocked my average pace at 9:42 per mile. But once again, it was a very odd run overall.

The first 5-ish miles were great. No pain at all. Only when I got to Patterson Park and started on a longer downhill did I feel some of that same dull pain in my knee. But, it subsided a bit once I hit some flat patches and by the time I was out of the park and heading east toward home, it felt mostly OK and I only had a couple twinges on the downhill overpass on the way back to the house.

It felt a bit sore when I got home, so after stretching, I put some ice on it for a while and took a couple ibuprofen. That seemed to help and it didn't feel nearly as unwieldy as it did post-run on Saturday. By Sunday night, it felt actually very good. Very few periods of discomfort.

And I woke up on Monday and it felt great and got better as the day wound on. I already had Monday as a rest day, so that was fine. And by yesterday afternoon, the knee felt back to normal. I caught a bus home that drops me a little over a mile from the house, and the knee felt strong the entire walk home, which was a very encouraging sign. Since then, I haven't felt a single twinge or any discomfort. I have zero clue what happened to help it heal or the pain to subside.

The true test will of course be this evening when I head out for my regularly scheduled 5 miles and then post-run. But I have little more idea of what I tweaked now than I did on Wednesday night. I thought it might be ITB Syndrome, but now I don't think so, given it hasn't gotten worse as I've run. It's possible I just overdid it and bruised the top of the tibia a bit, but I'm not a doctor and am just guessing.

Thankfully, a little rest and some ice and some Advil were all I needed, but it's a definite lesson in taking it slow and gradually ramping my training. Probably going from zero speedwork to hill repeats and a fartlek run was foolish, so I'm going to have to add those a bit more gradually. And I'll have to be careful about adding too much mileage. To that end, I'm working on a longer term training schedule that adds in recovery weeks every 3 to 4 weeks by lowering weekday miles and cutting the long run by 50% or so. It's a work in progress...