I've got a 5km swim tomorrow. *yawn* It is going to be... SO. BORING. The main reason for doing it was to regain some pride after the Thames swim a while back, and to check out what Dorney lake is like for the HSBC triathlon in September. Now Mr TOTKat isn't swimming tomorrow, I've got nothing there around the pride regain. Conversely, I couldn't be humiliated again by him beating me again as he's not swimming.
I've been quiet on the race training front recetly. Mostly because I've done no cycling and very little running. Since the Virgin Triathlon, I've done two long runs to extend my distance in the lead up to Nike+ Run To The Beat in a few weeks' time. The first was two weekends ago and we did a long, slow run around the Wimbledon Common Parkrun route of about 9.5km. As usual, I strapped up my left knee and that felt lovely. Confident and comfortable, all went well until about 6-7km in when my right knee started to niggle... and niggle.. and get worse and worse. I pushed through as it didn't feel the same as my left knee does and I was keen not to give in to anything that really wasn't a proper problem. Which was a mistake. 5 days of ow followed.
The following weekend we extended the distance to 13.9km. Again my left knee strapped up and fine and I strapped the right to see what might happen. Same as the previous week. Not good. So, a trip back to the physio on Wednesday this week and he was unimpressed. He can't really work out why/what is going on and is a bit peeved by it all. A supposition now is that perhaps, as I've not been doing a lot of running in the grand scheme of things and I've not been doing running for very long (around 2 years), I'm actually just really bad at running. Not just slow and crap (he laughed at my 10km time in the last triathlon, bastard), but slow and damaging and crap.
The current idea is to foam roll my awfully tight quads a bit, try a quick (deliberately a bit faster than usual) run to see if speed makes it worse/brings it on earlier, and try not strapping the left one to see how that is getting on. In parallel, he's suggested I look at Pose method running. Which is interesting in that when I started to learn to run, I did run very much like falling fowards and nowadays I run very upright so there may be something in the method change.
Anyone got any thoughts/ideas/experience with Pose? I've read a bit and it seems logical in some ways, but...
Not with POSE as such but I did do a Chi running course 3 years ago and its very very similar. Its also pretty much what most running coaches advocate in their books nowadays. It took me from a fairly slow heel striker plagued by injury to a significantly faster midfoot striker who could cope with high mileage and had few injury niggles. definitely go for it!
ReplyDeleteHmmm, how interesting. I'm quite amused by your physio's peeved reaction (clearly your knee's refusal to cooperate is insulting to his professional pride!!).
ReplyDeleteHope you get it sorted; at least you've still got lots of options to explore. And POSE or whatnot does sound very interesting.
I've read a book about CHi running, based on the above I may have to haul it out the cupboard for a second read.
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