Real David H.

Now is not the time to ask me for advice. Simply put, I’m not following my usual own advice very well that I give to others. But with three weeks to go until the Richmond Marathon, I have to figure out this knee issue if I’m even going to be able to run it.
So that leads me to what I’m doing right now: testing things out … and I may have figured it out.

On Monday, I stupidly ran through some pain after it set in after a couple of miles. Very stupid. I iced and stretched afterward and things felt fine soon after. I took Tuesday off and did some cross training push-ups, sit-ups and more, including some squats during the first hour of “The Biggest Loser.” During the squats I had no pain, so I decided then to run on Wednesday.

Before running Wednesday, I took the advice of some Twitter followers and bought some KT Tape. Major failure. It would not stick to my leg well at all. Long story short, I need to trim the hair on my legs for it to work. I did manage to have some tape around my knee for about a mile and things felt pretty good. All in the all, the run was going fine until about 3 miles in. I stopped as soon as the pain set in.

Once again I iced and stretched. Today, things felt good with just walking around and on steps. Through various comments on Twitter and through an email of a friend, I remembered a TruFit wrap that I had. While it is made to go below the knee, I wrapped it around the top of my knee. The result? A pain-free run of nearly 4 miles.

So maybe it’s ITBS, runner’s knee, post-long run soreness or the fact I’ve put more miles on my legs than ever this year … or maybe it’s a combination of all this … I don’t know. I know that I ran without pain tonight and I’ll try it all again this weekend.