Training Update: Long run now 40 minutes (4 miles)

Earlier this week I was able to run for 40 minutes, covering a little over 4 miles. Definitely a nice milestone for me. Overall, my progress has been very slow, but steady.

I'm still running every other day. Making sure I am recovering well has helped me to progress. In fact, I've almost completely stopped cycling, which I had been doing every day while recovering from my two surgeries. As the running load has gone up I needed to find a way to reduce the overall load on my knee. A few times I started to get some burning pain in the knee, but that has been absent since I dropped the cycling a few weeks back. I've restarted BFR training to strengthen my right leg, but I'm only doing that once every 4 days. The lack of exercise on non-running days is making it harder to keep my weight within reason, but eventually increased running (and possibly a return to some cycling) will make that easier down the line.

I've been doing a treadmill incline "hill" workout every 6 days...7 of these workouts so far. I'm up to 5 x 2-min repeats at 6% incline at about 10:00-10:20 min/mile pace. As described previously on this blog, my idea for introducing this so early in training is to send stronger neural signals to my quads (to recruit more muscle fibers to handle the increased load due to the incline). I need to "rewire" my knee to get my stride back and I'm hoping that sending stronger signals to my running muscles might accelerate that process. This seems to be working at least a little bit, but quite frankly I thought the results would come a little quicker. I'm going to stay with this approach a while longer and try to increase the duration of the intervals. In the next phase I'll start to do short "striders" to try and further rebuild my stride and restore my speed. When I can handle a bigger training load, I may incorporate both hills and striders  during each training week.

So in the near future I'll continue to do a 6-day cycle with 3 runs: a longer run, a treadmill hill workout, and an easy-to-medium run.

I still feel a fair amount of pain in my right knee while running, but mostly during the first 10 to 15 minutes of the run. Usually I warm up, loosen up, and feel better after that. While I'm not running, my knee does not feel anything close to "normal." I still have much stiffness beyond 90 degrees of flexion. Stairs feel strange...my kneecap just doesn't track normally. I still have issues with swelling when I'm on my feet for a long time. All of this is improving, but very slowly. I don't know when the improvement will stop and I don't know just how far I'll be able to go...but I'm still very keen to find out.

If I have no major setbacks (…and that's a big "if"), I'm thinking I might run a race by the end of this year. Perhaps something in the range of 10K to a half marathon. I have a local race in mind, but I'm not going to publicly disclose it yet. It is probably premature to really think about racing again, but having a tentative race on my calendar helps me stay focused and motivated. Looking forward to having some fun with my fellow runners by the end of the year.