Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow

Paul:

How long have you had this problem with the knee and lower back?

I've been having lower back pain AT LEAST since last July after Des News, most likely since mid-June. It came and went and was tolerable until after Alta Peruvian and Top of Utah; in the days after Top of Utah I could not run at all it was so bad, and seeing a chiropractor was the only thing that got me through St. George. It got a bit better during my three months off, but never really went away, and has flared up again the last month.

I experienced patellofemoral pain in my left knee during the entire summer last year, and simply ran through it and took a lot of ibuprofin. I saw an orthopedic doctor after St. George, who gave me some good stretches and exercises, and it went away during my three months off rest and has not returned. The bad news is that my right knee developed the exact same thing in February.

The common thread to both of these problems may be very tight hamstrings, and I am working on stretching them. I have starting seeing a physical therapists for both these problems and am hoping for the best.

The funny thing is that I was completely injury-free for the last ten years. As a result, I neglected my stretching for years, and I think all the downhill pounding from racing and training for the Grand Slam took it's toll.

Note that your tendency to injury appeared around the same time you experienced a loss in your 5 K speed. Some people blame the loss of speed on getting older. I do not buy it. There are a lot of older folks that are just as fast after 30 or even 40 as they were in their 20s. However, I believe aging + doing something wrong leads to the loss of speed and to increased risk of injury.

That is an interested observation, and it may have some merit. However, I started losing 5k speed immediately after college. The 15:40 I ran at Draper in 2003 is a far cry from sub-14:50 in 2001. I didn't have any problems with injury until 2005. But that being said, patellofemoral pain is often caused by muscle imbalances, and back pain can be cause by lack of core strength, and perhaps these have changed since college due to my training and conditioning (or lack thereof). I definitely don't have the abs I used to. I also weighed over 140lbs for most of last summer, and my proper racing weight is 132, so that could have increased stress and injury.

Mostly, though, I'm pretty sure my problems came from downhill marathons. Downhill running on pavement for a marathon distance is EXTREMELY hard on one's body, and I did 4 downhill marathons last year, as well as the Peruvian.

By the way, I blame my loss of speed not on age, but on training!

Some thoughts. It took only 2 marathons for the problems to start, one on pavement (Ogden) and one on dirt three weeks later (Park City). Ogden is a very mild downhill except for the section after 18.

You ran 15:38 in Draper Days in 2003. Although the course has a cumulative 0.4% drop, most track runners I know of never hit their sea-level track PRs on it. So while 14:47 at sea level on the track is still probably a better performance, 15:38 in Draper Days is not that far away from it.

How much did you weigh in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004?

I weighed about 132-133 through track season of 2001, and then I quit running for about a year, so I imagine I was in the mid-140s for 2002. 2003 and 2004 I was probably in the mid 130s, as I was doing high mileage those summers. 2005 I never really got my weight down, because my mileage never got very high. I don't start losing weight until I hit 70+ miles/week. During off-seasons of all those years I got up to high 140s to low 150s. Pretty fat.