Today marks nine months since my knee surgery. After some cycling, I put on my running shoes and shuffled out in the parking lot for a few minutes.
All I can say with certainty is that my knee hurts when I run. I went about twenty or thirty steps before pain started somewhere around the joint. I went about a minute, stopped and stretched, and then walked for a few more minutes before going again for another minute. It wasn’t any better the second time around, and the pain seemed to get worse. I haven’t had any serious knee pain in a very long time. It doesn’t hurt when cycling: I can mash the pedals and ride up hills out of the saddle or sprint to beat a light and I have no pain at all. It doesn’t hurt when I climb stairs, nor do I feel any popping or locking that I used to. It still doesn’t hurt when I put in the clutch to shift in my car.
While running for the first time since November or December felt awkward, the pain eclipsed any biomechanical weirdness. Run enough, and the biomechanics will smooth out. Oddly during a recent practice, one of my old teammates told me that my coach gave me as an example of good running form. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard someone comment on that. It’s like saying I’ve got great coordination — I struggle just to get my feet in the bicycle clips.
It feels as though the pain is in a different place than last July when the knee pain took me out. Since it’s been so long since last July when I experienced the knee pain while running, my perceptions of how things feel have been invalidated. That said, last July, I could tell that the pain came from a very specific place right next to the kneecap and that it was deep in the joint. This time it seems more spread out, more to the surface, and more lateral in its location. I had occasional pain similar to this at PT when the leg brace came off, and the PT told me it was my IT band. It could be my IT band, but when my teammate who eventually had microfracture first started feeling pain, he thought it was his IT band too.
The pain really comes down to one of two sources: either the microfracture failed to produce enough fibrocartilage to protect my knee from the impact of running, or it’s something soft tissue that I can deal with. Since the doctor and PT were extremely optimistic that the microfracture worked and that the cause of my pain was most likely from my IT band, I will first try dealing with this as a soft tissue problem. That means loads of stretching to try to smooth stuff out. I am not without precedent: when one guy with torn cartilage and microfracture first started running in the early winter, he experienced a lot of pain like I am now. Now he is running six, seven miles a day and the pain is much more manageable or even nonexistent on some days. Initially, I thought he was crazy the way he talked about running in excruciating pain, but it appears as though the pain wasn’t from the torn cartilage. At least not if he is feeling better while running more.
I can say that I am feeling a lot better overall than even before the surgery. I can go harder and longer on the bike than I could before. I can go almost two hours before I start to feel tired, while last summer I would be exhausted if I went that far. I can now power up hills that previously left me in the lowest gear and I can take on someone who passes me, when previously I would struggle just to stay on their wheel.
I will try to run small amounts as much as I can and see if this pain is manageable, while hopefully not making things worse.
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