Knee Pain After Some Bigger Weeks

Well, it finally happened.

I've been thinking over the last few weeks that I'm in a good stretch and at a REAL good place with my running. I feel like I'm TRULY "running" when I can log 70-80 miles/month. If I get close to 100 miles/month, that is GREAT. Well 8 out of 11 months so far this year have had more than 70 miles, and I even (just barely) cracked 100 miles last month. (March and April were low because I was figuring out a foot injury, and August was low because I raced twice and had some knee issues.)

Ten out of the last 14 weeks had 20+ miles of running, which is a GREAT "streak" for me!

But randomly, during a "normal" swim full of 200s yesterday, I pushed off the wall and my right knee had some sharp pain. It felt better during the swim, and then slowly got worse all day. My left calf tightened up and got quite sore later in the day, and my right side sacrum did as well. (I'm 100% sure this is all connected.) The good news is that I woke up and my knee seemed to be FINE. So I figured I'd test it on a short run, and use that "warm up" to get in a good stretch. So I just did an easy 4 miles this morning. The last time I had a day of running when I went less than that was during "One Last Tri" triathlon nearly 3 months ago! Here's my last <4 mile run in my training log through today:

That's a damn fine stretch of running. All of those weeks also have 3 runs except for 2: the week right after that triathlon (the 2nd week from the top), and the week right after the TC 10 Mile (5th week from the top). Since that first weekend in October, I've only raced once (the Minneapolis Halloween Half 10K at the end of October), but the weeks around that race had 3 runs each. Otherwise, it's been a lot of race-free training where I've been getting in decent runs.

I'm writing this a few hours post-run, and everything still feels OK! I'm still going to use that pain yesterday as a reason to back off for a bit. If I'm smart, I'll skip a run next week. And instead of a harder Spinerval trainer ride, maybe I'll just "spin" once this week as well. I need to give up any sort of "streak" and take it easy because my body is telling me to do that!