Weak at the knees

Finding the time for this is hard – weeks have passed since I have given any serious thought to writing. Every day life spins such a delicate and complex web of activity which distracts me from the stuff that’s really important. For example, I should spend more time thinking about my tax return. Instead, when I reach that point in the evening when I should be thinking about bettering myself or improving my quality of life there’s always a pile of washing up to do, wet laundry to hang out or an episode of Masterchef to watch. I’m a slave to domesticity. Should I leave the washing up until the morning? Is this the answer?

So already I have reneged on the agreement I made with myself to get busy running and get busy writing. Under normal circumstances this would not be a great surprise – I’m all too familiar by now with the disappointment of failing to follow through with my many and varied commitments to self improvement. I recall I spent about six weeks in Sydney in 2004 idly fantasizing about getting fit because a likeable and persistent gym membership salesman kept ringing me up and I kept deluding him (and myself) that I was going to join.

Nothing ever came of that, just like nothing ever came of the week I spent doing sit-ups and yoga in Dharamsala, imagining that I was about to embark on some sort of life altering spiritual adventure. I’m simply not self disciplined enough, that’s what I’ve been telling myself.

This is why it’s all the more frustrating that my training has been sabotaged not by this reassuringly common psychological weakness – this willingness to give up at the first hurdle – but by what I can only conclude (with my limited understanding of physiology)  is a freakish physical defect – I’m quite literally weak at the knees.

I’m quite a big fan of the philosophy of embracing pain. During my marathon training thus far I have found a way of liberating myself from the pain that begins to eat away at me at around the four kilometer mark – there’s something bittersweet about that battle to overcome the physical discomfort which is the inevitable result of pushing my body to it’s limit.

Even since my traveling days which regularly saw me dashing open my feet on rocks on exotic beaches or curled into impossible shapes on bus seats for hours and hours on endless dusty roads the fine line between pleasure and pain is something that has interested me. It’s at times like these, when my chest is heaving and shins are aching and my lungs are bursting, that I perceive that line so acutely, I know what it’s like to embrace pain – to engage with it and somehow assimilate it into my experience so that it becomes a cruel and sarcastic friend rather than a bitter foe.

This weakness in my knees is something else though. At first I ignored it, assuming that it was just another one of the background pains you have to deal with before, during and after a run. No doubt this is one of the inevitable side effects of the stressful transition a weak and flabby body must go through in order to become lean and strong, I thought. It was the experience of climbing in to bed and feeling my knees creak and click like an arthritic old man’s that alerted me to the fact that it might be a bit more serious than I had hitherto imagined.

A few possible causes have come to mind. Firstly, maybe I’m wearing the wrong shoes. With no real understanding of what I was looking for I inspected my New Balance MX1000NR’s (made in England) for about 30 seconds and then did a round of the local sports shops hoping to garner some expert advice from the sales assistants. I should’ve known better, most sports shops these days are more about fashion than fitness – as the amount of bling hanging off the staff and customers testified.

I spent 70 quid on my trainers 2 years ago when I started playing squash (that didn’t last) and I’ve frequently admired them when I’ve happened to catch sight of them in the corner of the bedroom – a bright beacon of hope in a wardrobe otherwise bereft of sporty items. Examining the small selection of really useful-looking trainers in JJB it occurred to me that I would heavily resent shelling out a similar amount for a new pair and would therefore have to do a serious amount of research before I would even consider such an extravagance. Glancing around the shop I realized that it was the wrong place for serious research. Where do the real sportsmen shop I wondered?

Secondly, it occurs to me that perhaps I’m running wrong. Before it was so cruelly curtailed, in the course of my training I developed a heartening routine which saw me do the following:

• jog gently to the corner of the street
• do some stretches on a expediently located horizontal bar (someone’s garden fence)
• run down the hill to Hove Park
• run around the park
• run (or more often walk) back up the hill to my convenient bar for a warm down
• home for a well deserved glance of juice and a shower

Admittedly my arms do flail around a bit more than might be deemed cool by the more sophisticated and experienced joggers I meet, but that can’t be it – maybe it’s simply that my feet are pounding the pavement a bit too hard during the latter stages of my runs – it does feel like I’m pushing myself to my limit every time, perhaps that isn’t a good thing.

What’s scary is that after two weeks of rest my knees are still giving me jip. I realize now how careful you have to be with this sort of thing, why professional footballers miss entire seasons or have to spend tens of thousands of pounds on keyhole surgery – if you mess up then it could be curtains for your career, or in my case, curtains for my ambition to run a marathon and consequently this blog.