Couch to 169K..... or bust

[Fellbeast]

So right at the beginning of this year my right knee went kaput. To be fair the warning signs had been there a while, with a niggle late summer last year slowly getting worse and worse but with me bashing on running more and more. And then on a mid week head torch run on 8 January, almost exactly 7 weeks ago, the knee blew the last of its fuses. Long story short its probably some kind of relatively long standing cartilage tear causing the pain, well according to my physio anyway, but he reckons with some perseverance and gumption I should be able to get up and running again.

And my progress so far has been:

1. No progress at all for the first two weeks, lots of lolling about on the couch with a few dog walks and a couple of really quite painful walks up Penyghent from home. I was maintaining a morning 30 minute exercise regime though (stretches, limbering up, press ups, sits ups and what not)

2. Next two weeks, bike rides were introduced and, generally, I was able to carry out short outings on the bike without too much reaction from the knee. I also introduced some more exercises to my morning limber up, including some squats and knee specific stretches, and started wii fit jogging - very painfully

3. Third two weeks, the morning jogs on the wii fit (like a poor man's zwift while jogging on the spot on the living room carpet ) got a bit more comfortable (until about the 20 minute mark when they didn't) and the exercises definitely so, including some knee bends that would have been excruciating before. A bit longer distances on the bike and right towards the end I experimented with a couple of really quite uncomfortable two mile runs around the river from home, each run just over two miles long


4. Last week - in the last 7 days I've kind of thrown caution to the wind. I did a pretty slow but successful 4.6 mile run up to the shoulder of Penyghent on Saturday without too much pain and, on Sunday, a huge (for me) 25.6 mile bike ride from home. Those two together meant that my knee didn't feel too great on Monday, so I rested apart from a couple of dog walks, but I ran 3.1 miles on Tuesday evening (successfully completing my very first couch to 5K program ) and a similar distance yesterday evening. My knee didn't much enjoy yesterday evening's run I must admit but feels pretty okay today. Shortish bike rides are planned for today and tomorrow with maybe another 5 mile or so run on Saturday and hopefully another long bike ride on Sunday.


So far so good but really slow going in terms of real progress. Which brings me to the point of all this. I'm down yet again for the Lakeland 100 on 23rd July, in 5 months time, and I really want to be fit enough to a) run it and b) do well in it. I'll settle for just a) though. And at the minute 5 months doesn't seem long enough. The race is actually 105 miles long which is 169 kilometres.

So, hopefully I won't bore anyone that bothers to read this thread, but the idea is that I catalogue my injury recovering, training and eventual success in my 'couch to 169K' fitness program. I guess I'm doing this mainly for my own motivation really - if I post about it, I'll look more of a prat if I fail