Knee pain post marathon

Hi Beth- well done on running the marathon, it’s no mean feat.

One of the skills when planning to train for and run a marathon is making sure that you do enough training, but not too much to injure your self, and in an ideal world your final run, the race itself, is when your body says enough is enough.

And you’re just still feeling the effects – all pretty normal and you just need to get your knee, gently back into the groove.

The underside surface of your kneecap has taken a fair and repetitive pounding over the last few months and is now very sensitive to repetitive loading, such as a simple jog.

You can either give it a longer break and decrease your loading by swimming, rowing or biking – and then try to restart running in a few weeks, or you can take a more proactive approach.

You can tape your knee

or you can foam roll your ITB or stretch your quads pre run (not as successful but may help) or better still is to mobilise your own knee cap (or get a physio to do it).

In the most simplistic term straighten your left knee out in front of you when sitting, and then bend it a little (put a small pillow under the knee), and using the heel of your left hand, hook it along side the outer bit of your kneecap (which’ll just be visible when your knee is bent) and push your knee cap to the right,firmly – push back and forth in a comfy rhythm for a good few minutes to help “stretch” tight tissue on the outside of you knee….this maximises your area your kneecap can move over.

Get up go for a run concentrating on standing tall, smaller strides and greater cadence – just for a pain free 5 minutes, then slowly start to increase the time from the next time out.

The Guru