Recovery and Rehab Update: Month 5 After 2nd Surgery

I'm 5 months out from surgery #2 and 11.5 months out from the original right knee mosaicplasty surgery. I'm still a long way from "normal", but I've started doing some "running" again.

Several weeks ago, I was reintroduced to "running" on an Alter G treadmill at the place where I do my PT. I ran for 2 minutes twice (with a 3-min walk in between) at 60% of my bodyweight. Felt very strange...like I had never run before in my life. At my most recent PT visit, I did the same workout at 70% bodyweight. It went much better. I went from 14 minutes/mile pace to 12 minutes/mile.

As previously mentioned, my plan was to work my way up to 20+ minutes of walking every other day and then to start adding some short running intervals to the walks. That plan has worked so far. I've done 5 walks now that included a little bit of running. I started with 4 15-second running intervals for a total of 1 minute of running and in my last walk/run I was able to do 4 45-second running intervals for a total of 3 minutes of running. The running in the first walk/run workout was more of a 15-second shuffle/stumble, but I've smoothed out a bit since. During the last workout I felt a bit of medial knee pain. It may have been due to the hard BFR workout the day before, but it is a reminder I need to remain cautious and back off a bit to keep pain and inflammation under control.

My plan for running in the next few months or so is to continue to replace a minute of walking with a minute of running after every few walk/run workouts. Once I can run 20 minutes at a time, I'll start adding a bit of structure to my weeks with one longer run each week to stretch endurance. Shortly after that I'll introduce some treadmill work to gradually increase my pace for short intervals and to introduce some incline running. This kind of work will (hopefully) help to "rebuild" my stride. (I'll discuss my "tread striders" approach to increasing speed in a future post...I don't want to get to far ahead of myself here.)