10 - Melt

Running Song of the Day:

I don’t know much about Phoneboy but I heard this song a few weeks ago and instantly knew it was a CERTIFIED BOP. Great to put on and pick up the pace a little. Dig a little deeper, get that breath really working.

Today’s Run:

Knee was a little swollen this morning. Stiff. Feels like a lil bit of cement is in there. Hard to explain other than that. It’s not liquid in there; I mean, realistically it probably is, but it doesn’t feel liquidy. Feels like almost hardened cement, thick and gloopy and made of rocks.

Not the best thing for your knee to feel like, especially with a six miler on the docket.

I fucked up my knee 20 years ago. A friend of mine and I, might have been my best friend at the time, we were doing some jiu jitsu sparring. We had taught ourselves how to grapple by watching videos online, which at the time felt…I don’t know, like we were pioneers almost? It wasn’t common, at the time. Most of the videos were also of a dubious quality.

Anyway, I stood up from his guard and he grabbed my ankles to sweep me down with that little ankle hold thing (works every time, it’s crazy) and as I was falling I guess the angle my knee was at took too much pressure and I heard a pop noise. My knee felt kinda weird after that, almost like I needed to “crack” it, similar to the feeling of needing to crack your knuckles.

The next day my knee had ballooned up to double the size and I couldn’t put weight on it without a lot of pain.

I went to the doctor about a week later, I was on my parents insurance at the time. The doctor basically gave me some pain meds and said we couldn’t do any scans because insurance wouldn’t cover it.

So, that was it. Hope my knee gets better. Thanks, American medical industry.

My knee did get better (and then popped three other times over the years, all with worse pain) and then it got better again and it’s mostly stayed better? I run a decent amount though, usually at least a thousand miles a year, and it’s hard to know if my knee is overworked, or permanently damaged, or has some arthritis in it that acts up when I run too much, or a different thing I haven’t figured out yet.

Example: when I lived in a different town, I had about a 10 mile out and back route that I’d run a lot of days. One day when I was on the return route home, my knee just felt like this horrible lightning pain inside of it and it like instantly got swollen. I was just running normal, easy pace, didn’t tweak it or step awkwardly, just BOOM, pain.

I was about 3.5 miles out from my apartment, and it was 45 degrees. I had to hobble home for the next hour plus because at the time I wasn’t taking my phone with me on runs. I got super, super cold and wondered if I’d make it back or not.

(I made it back ((or did I, maybe this is a ghost blog)).)

The next day, my knee still kinda felt like shit but I went out running anyway. I don’t know why I did that, really. There was no real benefit to doing that.

And since I do not learn my lesson at all, my knee felt like crud today, or more accurately like a lil bit of cement is in there, and still I went out and ran a six miler.

Back to it: Today, feels like 67° with 5mph winds. RUNNING WEATHER, FOLKS.

Crunch that knee with each step, it doesn’t matter. Run easy, run low. Run small.

Regular easy route with the new turnaround point. 6.25er all day.

I am so tired I don’t want to keep doing this but I’m only 10% through this entire experiment. God save me God save knee.

6.3 miles
in
1:06:29
so it was
5.7mph on avg
with
538 ft of vert
and i’ve run
72.18 miles this Spring

Green Thing of the Day:

I ain’t no botanist and I don’t have that AI app on my phone that pretends to be a botanist, so all I know is that this is some kinda “weed” that most people don’t like dealing with. I think weeds are awesome; they grow on their own, in harsh locations, usually in spite of everything else. This little guy greets me along a bend in the road and today with the wind blowing just so, it looked like this little fella was waving at me.

Right back at ya, lil guy. Have a good one.