30 mins / 38:39 (3½ miles)

First scheduled training run with the nice new yellow shoe tag and I've gone way over the allotted time. Still, this was one of the standard routes around the new office building and I just couldn't be bothered trimming it to fit the schedule. Pity it was such a slow run.

A bigger problem is my knees, of course. I've got these exercises to do to help strengthen my inner quads, the muscles which are too weak to stop my overdeveloped outer quads from hauling my knee caps off to the side, but I've not been doing them enough. Indeed, I ended up taking two months off from the régime around New Year, and I haven't been doing them consistently at all since. Which is rather foolish, to put it kindly. I've started doing the exercises again today, on the grounds that if I don't do something about this then I'll greatly regret it later in the season, but today's run was tougher than it ought to have been for precisely that reason - lots of inner leg complaints as I trundled along the trails this morning, excessive gladness at a two minute wait for traffic lights, that sort of thing.

Nothing debilitating, though, so I am still optimistic about the marathon itself. It's too early to say about the truly crippling knee pain which brought me down last year since I'm not running those distances yet, but the relapse pain from last September that led me to go to the physio when I started running three and four milers then has not appeared either so I'm reasonably confident that things are going better now.

It's hard to be consistent with the exercises though.

Posted by Dunx at April 5, 2004 12:18 PM