Yeah, well, I'm old enough to be your mother!

Well, folks, the inevitable happened. I appear to be suffering from a minor kink in my right knee. Let's hope that I am blowing the whole thing out of proportion and tomorrow morning, it will be gone. I have had so many running injuries over the years that I'm afraid to run on anything that doesn't feel right.

This is the same knee that I dislocated when I was 17 years old simply by turning around in an odd way. I would later learn in physical therapy that my knee caps are very small and stick out too much, which means that I need strong muscles to hold the knees in place. I weighed about 85 pounds at the time so yeah, there were no strong muscles. This is one of the reasons why I started running way back when.

As most seasoned runners know, you need to slowly increase your weekly mileage. I have been trying really hard to not overdue it with the mileage but I may have been pushing my speed training a bit too much.

My first run this week after the weekend's big 5K was on Tuesday night. Well, I guess my first run was my "trail run" on Monday morning to get to the train on time but that doesn't really count. I was wearing sneakers though! So on Tuesday night, I wanted to run more than 3 miles since I had cut back on my mileage the week before due to all the speedwork I was doing in anticipation of the race but I wanted it to be an "easy run."

I hit the road and managed to find a new running route, which when clocked in the car turned out to be 4.6 miles. I ended up running it at an 11 minute mile pace which leads to the title of this post. As I was running by the high school with my 11 minute mile pace, this girl, presumably a student, with a perfect (hopefully spray-on) tan left the parking lot and ran past me like I was a speedwalker. In my mind I yelled out, "Yeah, well, I'm old enough to be your mother!"

Late yesterday morning, I noticed that my knee felt a bit stiff. It didn't hurt, just felt tight. It felt that way for most of the day but would disappear here and there. I poked around and found an area that feels a tiny bit tender to touch. I asked Rich, who is a licensed massage therapist (by the way), and his expert opinion is that something is sore from over use.

I am wondering if the humidity has anything to do with it. My knee is feeling better today and is not as stiff. The humidity is finally gone as well. It was super humid here on Tuesday and yesterday. So much so that the girls had curly hair.



They definitely have inherited my hair as Rich's hair is stick straight and I can't think of anyone in his family with curly hair.