Whining About Runner's Knee

It’s official now:  my plans to run a fall marathon have been cancelled.  They fell victim to the heat and deer flies of July, followed by a bum knee in August.  I think this is my first genuine case of runner’s knee, and it’s very hard to let it get completely better.

It needs rest, and what it’s been getting has been the 100 on 100 relay, which involved running 17.5 miles spread over three legs in a single day.  It’s also had a lunchtime of ultimate Frisbee and a 5K.  These competitive occasions aren't conducive to going only as fast as the knee allows.

It’s not even that simple in reality.  Once the knee gets warmed up it allows quite a bit, but with a penalty to be paid at some future time.  As a result, I end up hobbling to the kitchen at work to get my coffee, then get a stabbing pain when I twist wrong getting milk out of the fridge, but am almost pain free when out on a five mile run later the same day.  Perhaps I should just give up coffee?  I've tried decaf but it doesn't seem to make a difference when opening the fridge.

Many times, the knee actually feels better after a run.  This is a relative thing, however.  It would be more accurate to say that other things hurt worse, so the body’s natural reaction is to raise the pain threshold, which makes the knee feel better.  The flip side is that complete rest tends to lower the pain threshold, so at least for me being sedentary means everything hurts for no particular reason.

And like many runners, I run for the stress relief and the social opportunities.  When a body part acts up, it interferes with my mental health and social life.  It ends up being a three way hit.  My knee hurts, I’m grumpy, and anybody who really can understand is outside running or playing Frisbee.

Enough whining.  Next post will be about the new running plan and goals.

Windshield Wiper Meditation

I’ve been dabbling in the practice of meditation, and found an interesting way to practice on my commute home.   Let me see if I can explain this.

It’s raining, and the wipers aren’t decidedly not slappin’ out a tempo to the tune of an Eddie Rabbit song.  (Does anybody even remember Eddie Rabbit?)  No, my wipers are doing an imitation of an asthmatic goose, chattering away with a honk-weep, honk-weep kind of sound.

One of the interesting aspects of Buddhism is that each one of us constructs our world from our thoughts and all the inputs we receive from our senses.  “All that you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be” in the words of Pink Floyd.

Another aspect of Buddhism is the notion that suffering is caused by wishing that things were different than they actually are.  In other words, I suffer only if I interpret honk-weep as a sound that is annoying and one I shouldn’t have to deal with.

And thusly I spent my commute learning to accept the honk-weep sound as part of my world, and noticed that despite the sound, they are doing a decent job of keeping the windshield clear.  Better yet, their noise and the cacophony of the heavy rain totally drowns out the buzzing noise that happens at about 2k RPM which I haven’t been able to track down yet.

Driving a 16 year old truck turns out to be surprisingly similar to running with a 40-something year old body.  You have to learn which noises signal something serious that needs attention, and learn to accept all the rest as part of the whole experience.  My ankle just cracked while writing this. No problem!

Let's Run Some Intervals

After about five years of running, I’ve finally zeroed in on the perfect training stimulus for myself.  Here’s what I do:

  1) Find a quiet stretch of road that takes about 5-7 minutes to run at “full speed”.

  2) Warm up by jogging to that stretch of road (about half a mile away from home), then running the first interval at about 80% effort, with some short sprints thrown in.

  3) Recovery walk of about 5 minutes (which conveniently completes a lap and gets me back to the start of the quiet stretch of road.
  4) Run as fast as I possibly can sustain for the length of the road.  Target heart rate >90% of max on average, increasing to >95% at the end (for me, that’s 190+, sometimes approaching 200).  It needs to be intense enough to divert all available blood to the leg muscles to maintain the effort.
  5) Repeat steps 3 and 4 for a total of 3 intervals.  Keep track of the slowest of the three intervals for future reference.  This also encourages consistency instead of having one spectacular interval at the cost of the other reps.

I've been doing this about 3 times a month.  Physiologically, this establishes the conditions for maximal oxygen use by the leg muscles, which encourages growth of blood vessels and mitochondria and any other infrastructure that is needed for efficient energy production.  All this infrastructure greatly improves performance on longer, slower runs.

Suddenly, I’m noticing that my heart rate is dropping for a given pace on a normal run, and it’s much easier to do long runs with fewer walk breaks.  All those benefits you’re supposed to get from running lots of miles only happen for me when regular speed work is included.  Now I know.