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“Run when you can, walk if you have to, crawl if you must, just never give up.” Dean Karnazes

May 13th – Days until Dartmoor: 3, Days to Silverstone 10k: 113

I was going to call this, ‘the road to recovery’, but thought better of it as that would put me in direct comparison with people that are dealing with life altering, or threatening situations, whereas, I had a sore knee. A little perspective was called for, and I gave myself a stern talking to.

I understand now that my warm up routine was little lackluster, my cool down stretches not as effective as I would want them to be and I didn’t pay enough attention when the joint started to grumble.

The first couple of days after I recognised the issues about my knee were about compression and elevation, so the arrival of the knee… sock.. thing, really helped. To the point where I could tangibly feel it getting better. Then I started to use the foam roller that most of the running channels advocate on YouTube and boy did that open my eyes.

One of the best pieces that I saw was about how most knee pain is the result of the muscles in your leg pulling your knee in odd and different directions as they develop. Hence the need for effective warmup and warm down routines. With a little trial and error I found that the pain in my knee was due to muscles pulling it up and to the side, just at the bottom of my quads. I immediately remembered how they felt tight after a run, but how I had put that down to them developing. Reading, watching and generally learning about this stuff was fascinating. The construction of the average knee is a feat of engineering. Something I will be taking a lot more notice of moving forward.

I am now relatively pain free and taking 30 – 40 minutes walks daily to get my legs moving in the right way. Using the foam roller for a minute on each muscle group helps enormously and I am a little more cognisant of what’s going on. So all to the good. Key lesson here are the warmup and activation and the cool down stretching.

There was another key learning moment this weekend. (Back to the well worn themes of alcohol and sleep. So, if you’re bored by that particular subject, you have my permission to skip to the motivational quote at the end and we’ll say no more about it.)

In a shock to no-one I have discovered that when I drink I sleep poorly, when I don’t, I sleep well. The watch I have tracks various stages of sleep throughout the night and then scores your rest as a result. Up to the end of my 100 day drought, my sleep scores were averaging around 80 – 85. The first night of drinking: 48, the second 60, the third 40. As soon as I had a dry day, back up to 80 and I haven’t had any trouble since. Even my resting heart rate climbed to 55. Honestly, no wonder I felt exhausted and unmotivated all the time previously.

That’s not to say that I’m going tee-total from now on, but having a drink every day is right off the cards. I don’t care how cool it is. I just wish that when I was younger someone had told me that drinking and smoking were bad for you!

The last Hurrah? Well, not quite the last, but certainly have now ramped down the training to virtually nil as I screw up what is left of my doubt and worry and leave it behind and set out for Okehampton.

One more thing off of the bucket list was a 5k parkrun, which #littleDacombe and I did this last weekend, with a respectable time of 29m 59s.

My knee has calmed down to the point where I am not conscious of it and I had an appointment with a physio on Thursday just gone.

No more excuses now, time to walk.

“To be old and wise, first you must be young and stupid.” Anonymous