Attack of the Knee
This was a frustrating run. My knee has been giving me issues ever since I started running again after the snow shut everything down for three days. The issue, I think, is a lateral collateral ligament (LCL) strain. Feeling where it is tender on my outer knee, coupled with google searching, led me to this result. I also think my calves are tight for some reason, even though I’ve been stretching them pretty regularly. Growing pains, I guess.
Thankfully, the sprain isn’t devastating and I was able to finish the 5k. I also ran an extra half a mile or so before parkrun as I have signed up for a 10k training plan through Garmin Coach (with Certified Guy® Jeff Galloway), and the first run was a benchmark run because even though I imported my prior runs from Strava, Garmin don’t give a shit. So that was fun — driving to the site from Portland, starting, warming up for 2 min, running for 5, then 2 min of cool down. It wasn’t bad but Garmin is definitely reminding me that I’m in poor shape. According to it, my VO2 max is 39 right now; 40 is the border between “Poor” and “Fair.” I guess that’s better than just straight up being in the Poor category. I’m also wondering how much that will go up and how much of it is affected by me getting covid and/or my exposure to all the forest fire smoke from the Eagle Creek fire. We shall see.
Anyway, my knee is borked. Not, like, terribly, but enough to need rest. Garmin Coach wants me to run again tomorrow but I may postpone it, which is frustrating. I’m trying to mitigate my discouragement because injuries happen and you have to just let them heal up, but it also kind of sucks. I’ve been working hard trying to set up a 10% gradual increase of mileage and pace and whatnot and it’s just annoying and frustrating that my body’s like, “No, this is bad, stop.”
I should also say that I suspect the culprit behind my knee issues is (besides my weight) my shoes. I bought my shoes thinking I needed stability for overpronation but now they’re actually causing my feet to roll outwards all the time, making me realize what I really need is either no stability, or stability for supination (or whichever one is the one for my foot rolling outward, not inward). This is kind of interesting because my first running shoes had stability for pronation and I think that over the years I may have fixed that problem?
So because of the U.S. healthcare system, I can either choose to buy new running shoes, or pay my copay for the doctor appt to check my knee. Yeah, that’s right. I can probably do both but it’ll leave me, as the Irish say, skint. (I think more than the Irish say that, I’ve just been watching Bad Sisters lately and they say it a lot.) I honestly think I just need to rest for a couple of days so I’m going to try that first, which means I’ll buy shoes at an actual running store here in Portland rather than online, so someone can look at me and stuff.
Aaaaanyway, that’s parkrun 6. Next week is 7 and also the Shamrock Run the next day. I cannot miss the Shamrock Run, it is my triumphant return after 5 years away. So we’ll see how I run parkrun.
Until next time.
