Long Slow Road to Recovery

The plan this morning was to do a slow 12 miles and see if my knee can take it. I split it up into two halves. The first half I did very slowly and just carried a 16 ounce bottle of water. At the 6 mile mark I stopped the clock for about 2 minutes, switched to a 24 ounce bottle of water with a peanut butter Gatorade energy bar. I was feeling pretty good so I pushed a bit harder on the second half.

Mile  1 - 13:18          Mile  4 - 13:57
Mile  2 - 13:31          Mile  5 - 13:41
Mile  3 - 13:37          Mile  6 - 13:10
Average Pace - 13:32

Mile  7 - 13:05          Mile 10 - 12:57
Mile  8 - 13:15          Mile 11 - 12:45
Mile  9 - 12:56          Mile 12 - 12:23
Average Pace - 12:54

Total Workout - 2:38:41

At times I was feeling like I was doing more damage than good, but once the endorphins kicked in somewhere around mile 5, the pain nearly went away. However, later in the day I was limping around so maybe it was a bit too soon to get back on the road.

The puzzle is, how did I injure myself and what to do to keep it from happening again. As far as I can tell the problem is with the adductor muscles on my right leg. Although the pain is in my knee, I also feel tightness where the adductor attaches to the hip. The other end of the adductor attaches to the inside front of the knee and that's exactly where it hurts. My guess is that when I hit the wall on the long walk a couple of weeks ago, my right foot started hurting fairly early and in an attempt to relieve the pain I was rolling my foot inward thus putting excess strain on the adductor. According to "Heal Your Hips" by Robert Klapper, M.D., the orthopedic surgeon who diagnosed my knee problems when I was running, the treatment is to stretch the adductors and strengthen the abductors in order to get these opposing muscle groups back into balance.

Hopefully the tight shoe problem won't happen again. I got another pair of Loco Banditos but they didn't have a half size larger so they sent me a full size larger with the option of exchanging them once their new shipment came in. Surprisingly, these size 11's seem to fit me just fine. I must have been using a full size too small all this time!