By Jarly Bobadilla
Sometime around January of 2018, I started feeling pain in my left knee. It was a familiar feeling. About ten years earlier, I injured it on a canoe trip in the Everglades. Now, at the beginning of every training cycle, I feel tension accumulating in my knee as I build mileage and then release after I reach a certain level of fitness. The feeling has never bothered me enough to stop running, but touching my thumb to just below my kneecap remains tender and even painful at times.
For a while, I blamed my pain on an accident from that January. I sustained a burn that covered a great deal of my left leg. That is the only pot of coffee I ever regret brewing. It was absurdly painful and took months to heal. As a result of the burn, I thought I may have lost muscle tone, or that the ligaments around my knee may have weakened. I stopped running and became very cautious with that leg, often choosing to lead with my right leg and let that be the one carrying the most load.
I recovered from the burn, but the pain still lurked, so I started blaming my truck. It was a standard transmission Toyota Tacoma I had acquired that same January, and I became very suspicious of all the clutch pumping with my left leg. Each time I changed gears, I felt a little sting in my knee.
“If you thought your cat looked silly chasing a laser, don't be fooled, they are training to kill you.”
Running through mild injury is the seal of the archetypal runner. We are resilient, and we do not like to stop. I kept formulating theories and blaming different things while continuing to pile on miles through 2019, a year that included a visit to arguably the greatest running event in the world, the Boston Marathon. The day after the race, a little sore but triumphant, I wandered into the city. While carrying a 30-pound backpack, I severely twisted my right ankle on an uneven sidewalk. It makes sense that my left knee was starting to take a lot of extra weight, I thought later, as I couldn't use my right foot at all. Standing in line for 45 minutes at the New England Aquarium with a shoe-bursting swelling ankle was totally worth it, though, especially for the opportunity to see the penguin tank. They have installed lasers you can control for the penguins to chase. That's how they train them to hunt for food, I learned from one of the caretakers. If you thought your cat looked silly chasing a laser, don't be fooled, they are training to kill you.
Later in the year, I fractured that same ankle, sprinting after my dog, who was chasing a deer (and not a laser) into the woods. I couldn't run for eight long weeks and couldn't even walk without pain for close to six of those. Eventually, the foot got better, but the knee didn't. The theory of muscle imbalance and overreliance on my left leg started to enter more into the picture.
Since runners don't go to doctors, because the first thing they want us to do is stop running, I started doing research online instead. At this point, it was 2020, and following the internet's advice, I began a weekly Bikram Yoga class. It quickly became evident how much I needed something like this because of how tight I was! If you have ever seen a board sweat, well, that was me. I was particularly bad at bending back. My hip flexors seemed to be short and not down to stretch, even at 105 degrees Fahrenheit. My next step was trying to figure out if hip flexors had anything to do with bad knees.
It turns out, said the internet, tight hip flexors are related to feet, lower back, and neck pain, not just the knees. These last two symptoms were not strangers to me either. The literature agreed that the main reason these muscles shorten and weaken is due to sitting down for too long. Not surprisingly, I am in the nineteenth year of a career in computers. Sitting down is terrible, I get it, but wait! You would think running would have helped! Some more reading revealed that when you practice a sport that makes the hip move primarily in one plane, like biking or running, it can worsen such a condition.
While all of this made sense, I was still skeptical about the answer to the mystery. In the end, this was all information I read on the internet. Multiple articles cited scientific papers behind paywalls and others I did not have enough academic background to even understand. However, I didn't find any good reasons not to try the potential solutions offered in some of these articles. Apparently, all I needed, and continue to need to do is consistent glute activation, hip stretches, and core strengthening exercises.
In hindsight, I don't think any of my earlier theories were unfounded. I'm sure all the accidents, the stiff clutch, and the sometimes aimless training, had a cumulative effect that brought me to where I am today. It is very hard to conduct a strictly scientific approach to dealing with an injury because of how many variables are involved. I am better these days, but it might be because I have considerably reduced my mileage. It might be because I am not doing workouts. Or maybe it’s because I'm not driving my truck to work every day. What matters most is I'm having fun with my new exercise routine, which will likely help my body perform better.
With the current pace of life amid a global pandemic, some of us have time to dive deeper into our bodies and listen carefully. The best time to recover and strengthen is now. Along with staying safe and healthy, be mindful and kind to yourselves. You deserve it.
About the Author
Jarly Bobadilla found running in his thirties. He juggles his career in tech and his passion for playing music with some extended running streaks. He and his dog, Vera, continue to chip away at building a home on a farm on the west side of Mount Desert Island.
