Day 51: I'm Back! (Well Sort of)

4:00PM

Fun Run

For those of you who've been following my knee injury I thought a make believe Q&A would be best for this post.

• What? Didn't you complain about knee pains this past week? Are you just a big wuss? Its true, my knee was hurting. It recovered fairly quick so I have a suspicion that it was a separate strain and not something from the original injury.
  
• Are you sure its not too early for you to be back? I looked at my old posts and I found that I originally injured my knee about six weeks ago. I didn't run for five of those weeks so I think that be plenty of time.
  
• You're an idiot! You should be resting your knee more. I mean you tore your meniscus. This is true. I am an idiot. Its been so long since I hurt it and I just wanted to see how it felt. I like to have answers right away. I'm just impatient. Today we had perfect running weather so that was a big plus.
  
• Fair enough. So how far did you go? How fast? I was really trying to hold back. I went out there really believing I was just going to do 10 minutes. I even wore my vibrams just to hold myself back even more. I ended up walking for the first couple of minutes and started out at a very light jog at 10min/mi pace. That felt great so I started focusing on my form and cadence. Still felt good. I looked down at my watch and I was pushing a 7:30min/mi pace. Whoa! Baby steps Ryan, baby steps. I brought it back down as much as possible and even threw in some walking at the end but you know I was smiling all the way. I ended up doing a mile and a half in a bout 15 minutes.
  
• Big Question: How does the knee feel? Surprisingly it felt good during the run and it still feels good. I came home, stretched, and did some rehabilitation exercises. I heard both of my knees pop a little bit but I think that's more from stiffness. More than anything my calves were sore. This is obviously because they haven't had to absorb any impact from running in several weeks. I'm not in the clear yet. I'll monitor it over the next couple of days but it looks like I can start running again. Yay!