[xenihn]

How did it happen, and do you have any suggestions for avoiding it? I want to start running, but I'm scared of something like this happening to me. I've never stuck with consistent exercise, and I know that gradually building up is necessary to avoid injury, but I don't know how to gauge if I'm going too far or not, since I expect there to be pain even if I'm doing everything right.

I've never had any sort of injury like this, which means I never learned how to recover or avoid them when doing so would have been easier (when younger).

[clarry]

> How did it happen

It just did. Halfway through my usual route, I started to notice a light ache around the knee. Initially I didn't think much of it, I figured it's just a little stronger than normal muscle soreness, nothing unusual for exercise. But I did lighten my pace a bit (not that I was pushing hard to begin with). About half a mile later I switched to walking because I didn't feel comfortable. I walked home OK and it wasn't terribly painful at that point, took a shower, ate, relaxed a bit and by the late evening it had gotten much worse and I couldn't really take a step with that leg.

The other knee was similar but different. Started feeling light ache when I took steps. It never got very bad but I stopped running. What was bad, and painful, really painful, was pulling on the leg. Like when you pull your pants off when changing clothes, or when helping a tight shoe off with the hand. Apart from that, it was always an annoying ache when taking steps. Rest and it goes away. Walk to the grocery store and back, and the ache is back, and so is the pain when you take pants off.

> and do you have any suggestions for avoiding it?

Not really. Checking with a physiotherapist or some experienced running coach would probably be ideal, but I guess the alternative is to just.. not push as far as I did. Give your body plenty of time to adapt, increase the load only in tiny increments over months, and immediately stop at first sign of pain? But as you say, it's hard to gauge. I didn't think I was pushing hard at all! If anything, I felt like I was in great shape to run longer and faster than I did.

If you do a search for knee injuries & strength training exercises, you'll also find that there's supposedly a lot you can and probably should do to improve muscle strength to stabilize the knee and let other parts of the body take up some load to reduce the likelihood of injury.

[danpat]

For running, this sounds very much like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliotibial_band_syndrome

Non-specific knee ache leaving you crippled walking down stairs, and some other specific movements that cause the iliotibial band (on the outside of your knee) to rub over the bone/bursa. Super common running injury.

For me, the fix is - ice, stretching, instantly stop running if I feel a twinge, and, most importantly, ramp up mileage very very slowly (first week, 1 block, second week, 2 blocks, third week, ruin 3 blocks). Learning what it really means to "ramp up slowly" was the big challenge for me - it's always too tempting to go "hey, I used to be able to run 10mi easily, I'll just crank out an easy 5" - boom, limping for a week.

[mlhn]

I ran alot years back ago. Knee ache which made it impossible to run.

As you said, and what a nurse told me I needed stretching. That's helped against part of the ache, but for the running, I read the book born to run. They talk about using your calf muscle as a spring (sorry if this is the wrong words, I am not a native english speaker).

To do this you need to take short steps where you land your feet under you all the time so you don't put your heel in the ground. Very tough training to begin with, but it at least removed all my running problems.

Since I was a heelrunner I had to start over, since this is very tiring.

[tim333]

Not an expert so take this with a pinch of salt but knee injuries seem more common with highly padded footware. With the barefoot type running we evolved for you have to adopt a low impact style. With spongy running shoes you can land anyhow without foot pain but then the shock gets your knees. I wouldn't personally go as far as bare foot or those five finger things but using less padded shoes may reduce the risk of knee issues.

[clarry]

I did a bit of spelunking around about this issue recently and found theories but no evidence to support having more or less padding. The only conclusive result I remember from a study was that barefoot runners experienced more injuries..

[tim333]

Yeah I googled around a bit and found not much evidence. I currently theorise a bit that you can run a little without padding to learn that running style but then go back to normal shoes and try to keep it up. Not quite sure myself.