Run Farther without Knee Pain

Today you’ll learn how to run farther every week without knee pain.

In another video I talked about adding more time to your run, this video is for distance tracking runners.

If you're looking to add more time because you track time, not distance, check out the link to that video.

To run farther, first you’ll need to know a few things

How far you currently run without knee pain

Your pace

Your goal distance

How many times a week you want to run

Do you want all your runs to be the same distance or do you have 1 long run and then a few shorter runs?

It’ll tell you exactly how to use that information by the end of this video, so stay with me.

Let’s look at an example.

My client Marie got back to running when her 2nd child was almost 1.

She was frustrated she didn’t bounce back after baby #2 like she did baby #1 so she wanted to jump start her weight loss with running.

She wasn’t new to running so she chose her first run as 1.5 miles

She went out 3 days a week.

Each time she went out she just ran a new direction from her front door.

Some were 1.5, others 2.8 or even that golden 3.1

All seemed to go swimmingly until she hit a wall.

Her knee was getting more and more painful until one day she could barely walk around the house.

And the bouncing toddler and the infant obviously needed her, especially because it just so happened they were struggling with ear infections and teething.

So they wanted to be held constantly.

Not exactly restful for her knee.

Marie was able to rest a few days and went out for 1.5 again.

But she hit a wall she just couldn't get past.

Was she stuck at 1.5 forever?

No.

See it’s not that the distance was wrong, it’s that she went too far too fast.

Her knee wants to be introduced to distance gradually over time, not randomly and not too quickly.

Her knee wants her to follow the 10% rule.

The 10% rule means increasing distance or time by no more than 10% each week.

So for Marie’s case it means each week she should only run no more than 10% more.

This way her knee can get used to the distance over time.

Marie could do this 1 of 2 ways: do 10% more for each run that week, or add 10% of total mileage to 1 long run and keep the other 2 no more than the original distance.

If you want to know how to do the 1 long run version, you can learn those steps in another video that I link in the description.

In this video you’ll how to run farther each week with the same distance each time you go out for a run.

Ok so remember when I said that you needed to know a few things to do this? Let’s use Marie’s 5 from when she and I got started together.

1.5 miles was her comfortable distance, that was the distance she could run without knee pain.

Her pace was 10.5 minutes/mile

Her goal distance was 3.1 (a 5k)

She wanted to run 3 days a week

She wanted all her runs to be equal distance.

So let’s use the 10% rule to make Marie run farther without causing knee pain.

So the 10% rule means that she runs no more than 10% more each week for every run.  

And I know how I say it is confusing, I don’t mean add 10% to each run from the run before, like if you ran Monday it doesn’t mean increase by 10% on Wednesday. It’s add 10% to each run from the run last week.

So with 1.5 miles as Marie’s comfortable distance we take 10% of that which is 1.5 times 0.1 which is 0.15 miles. 

We add 0.15 miles to 1.5 miles.

Her new distance is 1.65 miles.

She’ll run 1.65 miles 3 days that week.

It’s important to know her pace here because to do this right she needs to only increase distance and keep her pace the same.

If she also goes faster that no longer follows the 10% rule which is: increase distance OR time, not both.

And following the 10% rule for training is important to not aggravate or cause knee pain.

Ok that’s how to run farther without knee pain, increase running distance without knee pain.

Try it out for yourself by taking your comfortable distance and add 10%.

If you’re not sure how to do that I created a Google Sheet to do the math for you. Click here for that google sheet access.

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