A Good Run and a Tweaked Knee

This past weekend I was scheduled to get in 18 miles of easy long runs with eight miles on Saturday and ten on Sunday.  The Saturday morning run was quite good. I got out early enough before it was too hot and held a steady pace toward the high end of the range of "easy" pace I was aiming for.  I had planned to stop at the four mile mark to replenish water, but I was enjoying the run so much, I just kept going when I got the turnoff for my house at 4 miles.  I finished the run and felt great.  As I changed and recovered, I noticed the interior side of my left knee was sore, but I didn't think much of it, because that was not unusual. I sat down and iced the knee and then went about the remainder of my day excited about the 10 miler the next day.  This was the week that the training schedule moved to the next level, and I would start logging some real miles.  In the early evening I went for a walk with my wife, and noticed pretty quickly that I had fairly significant soreness on the interior side of the knee when we walked.  It got worse as the walk went on.  It wasn't bad enough to cause a limp, but it was noticeable.  I decided that if it was sore at all on Sunday morning, I would be smart and skip the run.  As I feared, it was still sore the next morning, so I skipped the run.  And while it was fairly minor pain, I decided to take Monday off too.  At 59, I need to be smart.  I have come back too far, to push too hard, too fast and cost myself more training time.  

For the last 4 months I had been working out fairly hard.  My current strength training workout involves something called a quadzilla complex (4 weighted lunges, 4 weighted jumping lunges, 4 unweighted jumping lunges, and 8 jumping squats). While punishing, it is obvious that this complex would build real strength in my legs, and with the jumping movements it provides explosiveness, as well as driving my heart rate up. There are other components of the workout, but "quadzilla" is the leg portion of the overall work out.  I am extra careful on form and while I usually do 6 rounds, if I feel I am too tired, I drop a round and/or cut some reps short.  Combining this workout with 4 days of running (two interval and two long runs) puts a lot of stress on the knees, so I think I have just  inflamed something (MCL?) through overuse. My plan in response to the knee pain was to take Sunday and Monday off, which I did, and do a two mile test run today (Tuesday), which I just completed. The run felt good, but I could feel the tenderness in the knee with each stride.  It wasn't serious pain at all, but it was there.  I will do strength training tomorrow, but I will eliminate the leg component of the workout. On Thursday, I will do two rounds of 2 mile runs to test the knee even further.   

As I noted, my sense is this is nothing more than an overuse injury. I have been ramping up the mileage steadily and pushing pretty hard in strength training. While I don't think or feel like a 59 year old (whatever that would be), my body is, in fact,  59 years old, so I need to be extra cautious at this point.  As I said earlier, I have come too far to force myself into a weeks long layoff, because I ignored what my body was trying to tell me.