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Hiker's Knee Issue Finally Resolved. |
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Written by mAineAc
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Friday, 18 September 2009 21:35 |
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and nothing that I say should be construed as medical in any way. This is just experience that I have had and I am sharing it. It may be useful to someone, but it should not be used in replacement of medical services if needed. As with any exercise program you should consult a physician before doing it.
I have been hiking pretty regularly for several years. Usually day hikes some short some fairly long. I enjoy going for rigorous multi day hikes sometimes though and those have always ended in pain for several days if not weeks. My left knee always had a tendency to to get very sore especially after a lot of down hill hiking. Of course anytime your climbing mountains, half the time is spent going downhill.
A little background first. About three years ago was the first time I had experience the excruciating pain of hikers knee. The outside of my left knee would be very painful. I had intended to hike the entire 100 mile wilderness from Monson to the Katahdin peak. By the time I got to Gulf Hagus I had to get out of the woods because my knee hurt so bad. About one or two days into the hike my knee hurt so bad that that I was barely able to climb, but I was already in the woods far enough where there was no real turning point. I was fortunate enough to run into a lot of helpful people. One person had given me a bandanna to put around my leg above my knee to try to relieve some of the pain and someone had given me some ibuprofen to help ease the pain. I also made a makeshift walking stick. All of this benefited me but by this time I had been so slowed down that I was running low on food and there was no way for me to continue.
This stopped me from taking any long hikes for a while. Since then I have obtained a good set of trekking poles and I have done a few hikes. The pain in my knee continued but with the poles it would take longer to arrive and the poles made it much easier to hike even when in pain. This spring I hiked the Bigelow Range. This caused another bout of very bad knee pain that lasted for several weeks. I decided it was time for action. The most I got from my doctor was 800 mg ibuprofen and no way to fix the problem except not to hike.
I started doing a little research as to what causes the problem. I found that most times it is a weakness in the leg muscles not giving enough support to the knee. I found some exercises with ankle weights but nothing seemed to really help. I had also been looking at a lot of the headlines around about running barefoot.
While reading about running barefoot I found that the sneakers that we wear are causing a lot of the weakness problems. The bare foot reacts much differently than the shod foot when walking and running. It acts a a springboard and is very sensitive to to what it is stepping on and responds accordingly. This process uses a lot of muscles that shoes in general make it unnecessary to do. These muscles over time become weak and is the root cause of most knee and leg problems that people experience.
Well with this information in hand I decided to do an experiment. I would start running barefoot on my treadmill. A brief warning about doing this. The average person has worn shoes their entire lives. The most natural thing for human to do is to run or walk barefoot, but you never see many people do this after they are a toddler. This takes some getting used to. You will get blisters and there will be a lot of muscle pain in muscles you never knew you had in your feet and lower legs. You do not want to wear socks while doing this as it will make the blistering even worse. I know this from experience. They have shoes out now that are supposed to simulate or, are just like running barefoot. I have not used them so I don't know anything about those.
So I started to run barefoot on my treadmill. At first I was mostly running on the ball of my foot to try to reduce impact on my heels. This is very hard to do for very long times. After 15 minutes I had to stop. Like I said there was blisters. I did this for two or three days a week at first. I couldn't do much more than that, but I could feel it in the muscles in lower legs quite a bit. Eventually the soles of my feet started to toughen up. After losing a little skin after the blisters healed it became easier and easier. I didn't follow any set schedule and I eventually started running more naturally on my feet rather than on the balls. My heels do get a little sore, but not bad. At this time I do a half hour and I am able to get in a little over three miles at that. Once a week I try to do two set in a row so I will get an hour in with a short break in between. So after 3 1/2 months of doing this if came time to test my knee.
Today I just finished the hardest hike I have done yet. I hiked the Mahoosuc Range from the New Hampshire border to route 26, about 17 1/2 miles give or take. I did this with two nights and the second day I did about 10 miles. This was a pretty intense hike that I will have a story about with pictures in a few days. This hike was a true test. I am still sore, but it is muscle sore. My knees were 100% through out the entire hike. This is the first time I have been able to complete a hike of this magnitude without any knee pain in years. There were day hikes I have taken that left me for days with sore knees, but not this one.
I am fully satisfied after this hike that my hikers knee problem is resolved. As far as I am concerned it was the running barefoot that resolved and issue that has been plaguing me for years. In three months time with no set exercise plan I was able to accomplish something doctors were telling me I had to live with. When I needed a break form it I would sometimes take a week or two off from running barefoot, but in my off time from that I did keep up my regular running with running shoes as much as possible. But I can honestly say I have no joint pain at all, just lots of sore muscles, and isn't that why we do this to ourselves.
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Last Updated on Friday, 18 September 2009 21:37 |
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