Friday 5 - Dealing with my knee

This week went by pretty fast and it's already Friday!  I'm looking forward to the weekend as I've scheduled in plenty of time to relax :)  But before that, it's also time for the Friday Five link up hosted by Running on Happy & Fairytales and Fitness.
 

I've been thinking a lot about what's going on with my knee and what I should do about it.  It led to a DNF in March of 2017 at the Rock and Roll DC Half. And then it also led to me getting swept from the Disney World Marathon earlier this month.  So, clearly ignoring it wasn't the right answer.  I'm not going to say I ignored it completely but I rested it a bit after RnR DC as well as started icing it after long runs and didn't have any problems with it during the Star Wars Half, the Columbus Half, or the Avenger's Half.  So I guess I thought it was fine and that RnR DC was just a fluke due to the sub-freezing temperature.

However, looking back at my recaps from last year, I did start having problems with it during the 20 miler for marathon training.  I also cut short my first weekend run during the taper because I started feeling knee pain around mile 9 or so.  I guess there probably wasn't much I could do about it at that point anyways but there were things I probably should have been doing the whole time during training.  So here are some things I'm going to work on this year.

1.  Medical advice - I'm going to see someone about my knee.  I've emailed my doctor and am planning to go to a physical therapist so they can hopefully give me some guidance.

2.  Body Pump - With marathon training and the increased time spent running, I stopped going to body pump and just did strength training at home, mostly with body weight exercises.  I think body pump really did make me a stronger runner so I'm going to make that a priority this year and keep going to class even once I start training for races again too.

3.  Foam rolling - I know part of the problem was that my quad and IT band on that side were really tight.  I could feel it, and when I went for a massage after my 18 miler, the massage therapist actually commented on how tight those muscles were.  When we were at the marathon expo, we tried out this electric foam roller called a BFF.  It was amazing and really did seem to get deeper into the muscles than a traditional foam roller.  It was super expensive but I'm researching less expensive options for something similar.

4.  Anti-inflammatory supplements - I started taking turmeric before the race.  I've seen a lot of research about how it is useful for joint health and anti-inflammatory purposes.  It's an easy thing to add to my vitamins so I'm going to keep doing that.

5.  Explore options for during the race - And lastly, I'm going to start researching what I can do if this does happen during a race again.  So far, it does seem to be aggravated in the cold.  I don't know if there's something I can do to keep my upper legs warmer if it's supposed to be a really cold race.  My 20 miler training run also started in temperatures in the 20s.  I also want to look into biofreeze.  I saw a lot of people stopping at the medical tents to use biofreeze during the marathon.  Maybe that would have helped me to keep going?  I didn't want to use it during the race since I had never tried it before but in retrospect, I should have given it a try.  Also, maybe I should have stopped at medical for a tylenol?  I'm not sure if those things would have helped but in retrospect, they probably wouldn't have hurt.

So that's my plan for now.  Hopefully it helps!  If anyone has any other recommendations, I'd love to hear them :)