Road to Woollongong Part II: my knee hurts!

Last week was a somewhat patchy week for training.  On Sunday - the day after the benchmark run - I needed to go to the western suburbs to see a client (a pigeon racing club, no less!). After I’d seen them I went down to Altona beach to have a beer and chips and go for a walk to stretch my legs out.  
I wasn’t able to run again until Thursday, mainly due to pressure of work. I made up for it with walking home from the office most nights.

I decided to enter the half-marathon in the Victoria Police and Emergency Services games in order to test myself against other runners.  The games are fairly cheap to enter (about $25.00) and always a lot of fun.  It's a mild nuisance that it's on a Friday morning (which means a half-day off work) but on the plus side it's in Melbourne this year rather than Ballarat.

When I finally did get out on Thursday the run was a little troubling.  I settled on my usual 10 kilometres along the Capital City trail.  My legs should have been back to 100% but certainly didn’t feel like it. It took some effort of will to keep going, even if my average pace over the 10kms was fairly normal.

What was a bit troubling was a noticeable pain in my left knee whenever I went downhill (uphill was fine).  In the last three kilometres I was locking the leg in a partly bent position and rolling forward onto my right leg, which was doing all the work.  I'm really hoping the leg comes good, but I'll give it a bit of stretching and yoga on my off days.  I need to go and see the GP re some other things in the next few weeks and if it hasn't come good I'll ask what he thinks.  In the meantime I'll just keep pretending there isn't a problem.