Training Log: VeganKeegan

pt

Ugg being injured is boring.

C • . 1

10 minutes core - 5 minutes knee exercises

Knee update!

So finally got to see a doctor/physio for my knee. Went to the one Thomas recommend and he was excellent so many thanks to you Thomas. Looks like at the moment this is pretty best-case senior for my knee. The doctor thinks my knee cap and connected tissue got slightly out of line with the groove in the femur and caused irritation, most likely from -- you guessed it -- overtraining. Everything else about the knee and ligaments he thought looked fine so no huge issues just too much too quickly.

Not much that can be done besides some rest and light strength exercises but he seemed optimistic that I could start cross-training as soon as Thursday or Friday and back to running in a week or two. While this is definitely a bummer I also feel pretty relieved because I was worried it could be a much longer-term issue. Shouldn't lose too much fitness in that time and should be able to run both JK and West Point. May not be at completely full strength but at least will get to run. Still have a lingering feeling this could last much longer (mostly because that's what it seems happens to every running injury) but at the moment quite optimistic for future training.

C • Wooooo 2

Warm up

BUCs Relay!

Also apologies for the just awful grammar, missing words, and sentence structure, I'll also fix it once I am more awake (well I will fix to my still quite bad level of grammar).

TLDR - Manged to run pretty much race pace but probably wasn't good for the knee. My relay team came 3rd over all and the top EUOC team came first. Loads of fun.

So relay today. I was on the second team with David Bunn and Joe Hudd. I was really looking forward to this and wanted to do well for my team which was why I had been ok running so slow yesterday. I was the second leg so I started warming up right when David left. And my knee had definitely gotten worse because I could barely run. More of a hobble along the path to try to get the knee warm. If this had been a solo race I definitely would have dropped out, but since leg one was already out I felt I had no choice but to run.

So I took some painkillers, rolled out my leg, did some stretches, and warmed up some more. By the time leg one runners were coming back I could approach running normally. It was still painful but not enough to break my stride. So as I waited for David to hand off to me I was a little nervous. The second he came through the finish, however, I got hit by a burst of adrenaline and felt great. Started out running hard and managed to keep a fast pace throughout with very minimal pain from the knee. There was one control that was straight down about 150 meters and that hurt quite a bit but the rest of the course felt good on the knee.

Even though I was running strong I clearly wasn't in the best mindset because my orienteering was again not great. Again nothing terrible but a couple of 30-second to a minute mistakes and some poor route choices. Not to upset by this though because, between the knee pain and the 4 hours of sleep, I wasn't in the best mental mindset. The fact I didn't run off the map I will count as a win.

After finishing I was expecting my knee to be in agony but again not to much pain. Even now 8 hours or so later it still feels alright but it is definitely worse then it was. For example, it is now slightly swollen which it hadn't been before and aches just sitting which is also new.

So like I really shouldn't of run this weekend. And I know that, and I knew that while running but as of the moment I am kind of glad that I did. It was probably bad for my knee and we will see if I agree with that statement if I learn I just extend a two-week injury into an 8-week or longer injury. But in the current blissful ignorance I had a lot of fun racing this weekend and competing against different schools and running a relay is always good fun. So overall decent weekend. Sad I couldn't run full strength because it would have been cool to see where I stand against the top Uni students of the UK but still fun.

map! (grammar still bad :) also couldn't find m y map so the forking was wrong and thus the ms paint) -

C • Knee 1

C • ms paint 7

cool down

Ok, it has been a while but I am back. Well sort of. My knee is still quite painful so not really back to running but at least back to logging.

So I also rested Thursday and Friday in the hopes of my knee healing but really no such luck. I went for a short hike with a friend on Friday and the knee was still very painful, especially on the descent. After this hike, I really should have pulled out of orienteering this weekend. This race while important for the team was not incredibly important for me. I am here, after all, training almost exclusively for JWOC so no British race really matters all that much.

With that being said I still felt compelled to run. The reasons for this were twofold. Firstly I was bored and antsy. I had just basically done nothing for an entire week and I wanted to move. On top of this my week off instead of making my knee feel better instead just made it feel worse, which got me thinking that running therefore couldn't be that bad for if it was already painful being still what more could running do (looking back I see this is quite, um let's say bad thinking, but at the time it made sense)?

And secondly, this was the British University champs so I was competing for a team instead of myself. This gave me motivation to race because I felt I was impacting a team instead of just myself. I also just had a large desire to race this event because it was BUCS. It is the only time I will ever be able to do it and I can now say I raced for the best orienteering team in Brittian, which I found cool. I also was part of a relay and wanted to run for them as well.

So we went out and ran. And it was painful. Knee started hurting instantly during warm-up and never really got worse but persisted in pain throughout most of the course. It wasn't over powering but a dull throbbing pain that made me scared to run any faster than a very light jog. My body also just felt terrible after not running for a week and took almost half the course for my legs to feel awake. So between the pain and tired body, my navigation got affected as well, and ended up orienteering pretty poorly. No massive massive mistakes but on a course this easy I lost way to much time to errors.

Near the end of the course, the last bit on the open hill, I decided to speed up to see how it felt. I started to run real race pace and my knee felt absolutely fine, in fact, it felt better then it had all day. I know this is entirely due to adrenaline masking the pain but I find it interesting that the pain didn't increase with more speed. Also interesting was that my knee didn't really seem to hurt more after this race, like maybe a bit more painful but not crazily so. Anyways going to a doctor Monday so hopefully they will tell me whats up. Really worried at the moment this is going to knock me out for 4-8 weeks to fully heal which would really hamper JWOC training (also slightly worried this will be a Thomas or AJ scenario and I will be out for 1.5 years but I don't even want to think of that). But we will see, maybe it is something simple and will heal quickly.


and map - http://3drerun.worldofo.com/index.php?id=-16962939...

C • Knee test 5