Some of you will already know Lisa our practice manager. A few months ago Lisa completed the Keswick to Barrow walk along with Kerry one of our physios. They did amazing raising loads of money for some worthwhile causes as well as being the fastest all female team to finish.
During her training for the walk Lisa had increased her walking mileage a lot in a short period of time and started to get some pain in the back of her knee. This got worse after the walk and was starting to be painful during and after a run.
Now Lisa identifies herself as a runner it’s part of who she is, part of her DNA. She loves running, and I mean really loves it, so much so she just carried on despite the pain. Sound Familiar?
She even did the Grasmere gallop a 10km trail run a few weeks after the walk but found her knee pain was worse than ever after. It got so bad she even had to stop running, now. Now what do you call a runner who can’t run?
A “ner”!!
Now the funny thing is Lisa works in a physio clinic, she is surrounded every day by expert physios with loads of experience treating injured runners. We even have a RunFit service that that analyses and retrains running technique. And to top it all off Lisa gets free treatment as an employee.
So it might surprise you to hear that Lisa didn’t mention her injured knee to any of us. Not one little peep!
Why I hear you cry!
The reason is something we hear all the time from our clients.
She was scared we would tell her to stop doing the thing she loves, running. This is despite the fact that she had already stopped running because she was worried about the pain and doing more damage.
Lisa finally fessed up and told us her tale of woe. We listened to her story including what she wanted to achieve with her running (a sub 2hr half marathon). We assessed her and found a sore hamstring tendon inserting into the back of her knee (hamstring tendinopathy). Lisa was given some exercises to help calm down her pain followed by strengthening exercises to help build strength in her hamstring. We explained her problem and told her she could even start running again as long as the pain stayed at a low level and wasn’t worse the following day.
Lisa is now gradually increasing her running and strengthening exercises. She has a lot less pain and we have analysed her running technique and identified some areas she can work on to help reduce her risk of injury, improve her running and smash her 1/2 marathon personal best.
Lisa has very kindly agreed for us to share her story and some of her RunFit analysis videos and we will be catching up with her over the next few months to see how she gets on.
