Encouraging Signs

Had a nice 11 days with my daughter and son-in-law, who were visiting from Bangkok. We went to Kyoto (lots of shrines and temples) and Nikko (one huge shrine and an old Edo village, which was fun), as well as sightseeing in Tokyo. Did a LOT of walking and a lot of eating too.

And a bit of running. Did some 3 and 4k runs the previous week, then 6k on the 7th and 4,8,6k on the weekend and today (Monday).
The 6k included 600 x 4 and 1000 x 4, at about 5:30/km. Only slight soreness in the knee.
The 8k and 6k today I did as kind of a test, the 8k being 500 x 4 and 1000 x 6, and the 6k being 500 x 12. All with 100m walk in between each run, and all the runs at 5:30 - 5:50/km. Again, only slight soreness, which did not get worse. In fact, at the end today, the knee didn't hurt at all.

If the knee had hurt, or had hurt significantly worse today than yesterday, I would have gone back to the orthopedist, but now I think I can get away without doing so.

Anyway, it was encouraging, although I'm sure if I tried to run faster or longer, it would start to hurt.

Interestingly, I found that if instead of a normal "barefoot" type stride (short strides, fast cadence...you know what I mean), if I kind of glide along, not raising the knees high, it puts less stress on the knee. I'm going to keep running like this. You can't go fast that way, but that's just as well.

I'll try to increase distance gradually, sticking to the run/walk regimen for a while, and hopefully, one month from now I will be back to normal training. I'd better be!