Another Injury

Nothing like feeling as if you're getting on track with fitness only to be derailed by another injury.  This is a new type of pain in a familiar place.

When I was ramping up my marathon training last time, I got a pretty bad case of patellar tendinitis from doing an interval workout on a treadmill.  That was a pain that came on from overworking my knee and would flare up as I increased my workouts.  It makes sense since tendinitis is the inflammation of the tendon, so by overusing it I'm rubbing it and causing irritation to it, which makes it progressively get worse.  I had about 12 weeks of PT to get over it.

This injury is not tendinitis, but is still of my patellar tendon.  I was doing some sort of benign movement and there was instant severe pain in my knee.  The remnants of the pain lasted for a couple of minutes, subsiding relatively quickly.  But then I kept reaggrivating the pain by doing a certain combination of rotations and weight bearing on that knee.  I still haven't found out what the magic formula is for causing the flare up, but it keeps finding me.

The onset of this Tuesday.  Since it wasn't affecting my normal walking, I decided on Thursday I'd give it a little test and went for a run:




It might have been silly of me to do a six mile run with as much elevation gain as I do in a month, but it's what I was working with.  Plus, it was my brother-in-law's wedding that day, so I really felt the need to get in a good workout.

The run started off excruciatingly.  I thought I would have to quit before I got to 100 yards.  But gradually, the pain subsided and eventually it went away completely.  It's as if the tendon just needed to be warmed up, which is exactly the opposite of tendinitis.  Unfortunately, as a result of the run, the pain became more chronic and bothered me in day-to-day activities (obviously not the searing pain from hitting it just right).

It's feeling much better today, a week later, but I think I'll stay away from running for a bit and try to get back on my bike before I call up the orthopedist.

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