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nkrichards wrote:Uh oh...not what I expected to read.  Hope the knee has settled down a bit with a couple days of rest...

The knee has settled down to where I only notice it when I am walking and do a heel strike.  My left calf is still bummed out that I walked 3 miles home on Friday.  It's bummed because I couldn't put my heel down as I was walking.  Think as if I had a tack on the bottom of my heel, so the lower calf was highly engaged...and now upset, but getting better.

Before the recent knee pain, y'all may remember that I wasn't able to land my heel on the ground when I ran.  I've decided to walk with normal heel strike stride, so the knee can heal the whole area, not just enough healing to get me to run...that of course if it doesn't take a whole lot longer to heal.

I may have stumbled to a fix for the knee pain.  Stairs. 

I don't walk stairs much these days, but walking up a flight of stairs, this afternoon, the knee hurt in the same place as when I heel strike.  So, I'll start walking stairs to help my little knee get stronger.  Had I been working in an office building, I would be walking some of the stairs. 

To me, this might be a Eureka! moment.

Eureka, got something for you to try that might help with that knee.  Should have thought about it earlier but you mentioned that the stairs help, it hit me.  Get yourself an ankle weight (I have one that is 5 lbs and straps around my ankle).  Sit on the edge of a chair, place it around your ankle, and do leg lifts.  This will strengthen the quad and when strengthened that helps re-alignment of the knee and knee caps and works to "heal" (by strengthening) the knee area.  I do these all the time (or I use the quad machine at the gym) when my knees bug me.

Michele \"1L" Keane wrote:Eureka, got something for you to try that might help with that knee.  Should have thought about it earlier but you mentioned that the stairs help, it hit me.  Get yourself an ankle weight (I have one that is 5 lbs and straps around my ankle).  Sit on the edge of a chair, place it around your ankle, and do leg lifts.  This will strengthen the quad and when strengthened that helps re-alignment of the knee and knee caps and works to "heal" (by strengthening) the knee area.  I do these all the time (or I use the quad machine at the gym) when my knees bug me.

+1

That's a very good idea. 

And congrats on your Eureka! moment.

Hmmm, yeah, I'll try that.  Thanks, Miche1e.  This morning, I ran to the parking garage.  It took about two or three stops to run the 1.25 miles, but I got there.  I then walked up 7 flights of stairs, twice.  Amazingly, I wasn't winded on the first journey, but was huffin' a bit at the 6th flight on the 2nd trip.  Then, I walked back because the knee was whining a bit.

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8 years ago today, Hurricane Ike came up Galveston Bay at 110 mph (a strong category 2 storm).  It was the first hurricane to strike Houston and Galveston since 1983.  2.6 million out of power.  18 feet storm surge (category 5 strength) wiped out a lot of real estate just east of Galveston as it landed at 2:20 a.m. CT.  I was out of power for two weeks.  Below are a couple of pictures from then.  One shows the radar two hours before landfall and the other shows the debris on I-45, 7 miles from Galveston Island.  I-45 goes from Galveston through Houston and ends in Dallas.

ounce wrote:Hmmm, yeah, I'll try that.  Thanks, Miche1e.  This morning, I ran to the parking garage.  It took about two or three stops to run the 1.25 miles, but I got there.  I then walked up 7 flights of stairs, twice.  Amazingly, I wasn't winded on the first journey, but was huffin' a bit at the 6th flight on the 2nd trip.  Then, I walked back because the knee was whining a bit.

-30-

8 years ago today, Hurricane Ike came up Galveston Bay at 110 mph (a strong category 2 storm).  It was the first hurricane to strike Houston and Galveston since 1983.  2.6 million out of power.  18 feet storm surge (category 5 strength) wiped out a lot of real estate just east of Galveston as it landed at 2:20 a.m. CT.  I was out of power for two weeks.  Below are a couple of pictures from then.  One shows the radar two hours before landfall and the other shows the debris on I-45, 7 miles from Galveston Island.  I-45 goes from Galveston through Houston and ends in Dallas.

Hope the stairs and Michele's exercise get that knee rehabbed quickly.

Glad today was a bit calmer than 8 years ago!

Well - have you been working those knees???  Pretty messy after that hurricane.

Michele \"1L" Keane wrote:Well - have you been working those knees???  Pretty messy after that hurricane.

Oh, yes, ma'am!  I did not have an ankle weight, so I pulled out a 5 pound bag of flour and put it in a grocery bag (you know, the ones banned on the west coast) and it worked fine, as long as I'm sitting on a counter so I can get high enough to swing it.  3 sets of 10, each leg.

Since I've decided the knee issue is a muscle and not ligament issue (rightly or wrongly), it's a lot easier to 'punish' the muscle than to 'baby' the ligament into health.

Today, I had to take my car to get the rear brake pads replaced.  So I took it to the station that's on my running route to Memorial Park.  A journey of about 2.2 miles.  I walked back to my apt at a brisk walk making sure that I heel striked as much as possible.  I even walked zig zag some, to irritate the affected area.  The knee was fine or squawked juuuust a little.  At 7 p.m., they called and said it was ready.  I walked back.  The knee squawked a bit more and was mostly fine.

So, 4.4 miles for the day.  I'll rest it tomorrow and see what I can do for a run on Friday.

Regarding Ike, I was reminded last night that the eye of the storm was unusually large for a tropical storm.

A month after Katrina in 2005, Houston was in the crosshairs for a category 5 hurricane on a Saturday.  On Wednesday, 96% of the town left...and were stranded on all of the freeways out of town.  No gas, no restaurants and no hotels greeted those people.  We have plans now to mitigate this, but the freeways were packed for 100 miles in all directions, except southwest (it was coming from that direction).  As it turned out, the storm fooled us all and landed 90 miles east of Houston.  I stayed in town.

This is a shot of traffic on that Thursday, 70 miles north of Houston, taking both north and southbound sides of I-45

Today, I had a little extra protein to provide construction material for the muscles.  The left knee seems to be behaving itself, especially since I'm purposely heel striking my walks, however the lateral side of both shins were noticeably whiny after almost brisk walking 4.4 miles, yesterday.  Meh, they'll get over it.

I'm looking forward to a positive result on running, in the morning.  Maybe I should just cross my fingers that it'll work.  I'd like to shoot for 5 miles in the morning, but will go farther if things are going fine.

Looks like you've got a workable plan. That strength will build, though you may not see huge improvement, you know, tomorrow. But keep at it.

That was quite a storm you had. I wonder, what's the new plan to avoid the massive human disaster that happened eight years ago?

Mark B wrote:Looks like you've got a workable plan. That strength will build, though you may not see huge improvement, you know, tomorrow. But keep at it.

That was quite a storm you had. I wonder, what's the new plan to avoid the massive human disaster that happened eight years ago?

Thanks, yeah, 6 weeks to new muscle cells.  The only time that I worked quads was with squats.  Since the knees couldn't take squats anymore, I guess that helped the non-running part of the quad muscles to be neglected or the muscles supporting the quads to be neglected.

As far as the new storm evacuation plan, it's pretty involved and was first used with Ike.
1.  Residents near the coast (by zip code) get to evacuate first.
2.  City and county officials coordinate, due to severity of the storm, if parts of the county should leave or hunker down.  Lots of people just hunkered down for Ike.
3.  Create evacuation routes involving outlying counties from Harris County to allow outbound traffic to travel outbound on the inbound side of the freeways.  Involves cutting in spots about 35 miles out of Houston where temporary barriers now in place are removed to allow outbound traffic to drive on inbound lanes.  Also, outlying counties will block inbound entrance ramps to prevent head on collisions.  In I-10's case, that involves the 180 mile or so stretch to San Antonio.  180 miles of cars going west on both sides of I-10.  Same for I-45 almost to Dallas and US290 to Austin.  The cut-in spots are in place on those freeways.
4.  The right shoulder disabled vehicle lane has been converted to an evacuation lane.
5.  Arrangements are made with the gasoline distributors to have tanker trucks strategically located to refill gas station tanks.
6.  Gas stations are set up with generators, so the pumps will work.
7.  Electricity trucks are pre-positioned too.

When people left for Rita, this town was a ghost town.  Further, officials said for residents NOT to come back to town because there was no gas to refill the cars, when they got back because power was out for a lot of the town.  I was out of power for 8 hours for Rita.  Houston received the 'backside' or 'clean' west side of Rita, but it still had wind and rain for us.  The east side of a hurricane (specifically the NE quadrant) in the Gulf is the 'dirty' or more intense side of the storm because the Gulf has so much warm moisture to draw its energy and create intense rain bands.

During hurricane season, a lot of us refill our gas tanks at half empty, so we don't have to have gas if something forms.  Another week or two has to pass before Houston typically is out of the woods on storms, even though hurricane season lasts another two months.

That's quite a lot of preparations, and totally alien to my experience. We just have lots of rain, occasional wind, snow and ice -- and  volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, but those don't happen very often.

The "Keep Too Many People From Moving West" group, however, asks that I mention that when it rains for weeks at a time, this place is a pit of despair. It's why we have so much coffee and beer.

Well, we don't have most of those natural events.  Snow and ice?  We stay home.  Rain?  We cope.  The others?  We watch y'all on TV.

All of the above prep doesn't even include the old or those wanting government to take them somewhere.  During the evacuation for Rita, there was a Greyhound type bus taking 30 or 40 old folks to Dallas from an old folks home.  They almost got there, but the brakes overheated and the bus caught on fire, which was exacerbated by all the oxygen tanks on board.  I think 24 died.

When a disturbance comes off the west coast of Africa, it usually takes two weeks to get to the Gulf.  If a disturbance travels due west for 7 of those days, I'll look at things to see if it'll continue going west, before it starts the 're-curve' which all Atlantic cyclones will do.  Re-curve is turning north, then east in its life span.  Below is the 2005 hurricane season of storms, which clearly shows the re-curve of the storms.

I picked 5 miles for the distance, today.  Half of last week's schedule run (10 miles), but almost twice what I ended up doing (3 miles), with the option to do more if the stars aligned.

I ended up doing 8 miles.  The first 5 miles were fine with no serious whining from the knee.  I maintained the 160 cadence easily.  The last three miles were done at 14x cadence and the knee was reminding me about tracking straight to keep the discomfort down.  I had to stop a couple of times and walk to keep the knee from getting out of hand.  I was more interested at going the distance, than the pace.  Somehow, I messed up with the watch, so I don't have all the splits.  But it was slow with a couple of 16 splits.

I was mostly pleased with the run, except for the walking.  So, it seems I lucked out and guessed that it was muscle and not ligament as the source of pain.

I got to thinking that riding a stationery bike would help my quads, too, since I don't have a real bike.  Y'all have a good weekend.

Never had to evacuate for a hurricane (and I've lived through several from Gloria in the 80s, to Andrew, to Katrina and finally Sandy) or major snow or ice event - but I have had to take shelter for a tornado or two or three.... both in the SE US and here in the upper/eastern MW.    I don't think that I even mentioned that a tornado touched down the night before IM 70.3 Ohio about 1/2 mile from where all our bikes were racked for T1.  Yep - 1/2 mile to the east would have been a disaster with $10K flying around like a scene from the Wizard of Oz.  That yellow circle marks T1.

Yeah, that may have caused some 'anxious' moments (or other parts to pucker), if the timing was different.  Things thrown around, like you said, for sure.  I'm glad you weren't involved.

Houston won't ever see an EF4 or EF5 tornado because we're always in humidity.  Tornados generally form when Gulf air approaches dry air, plus other factors.  Mostly a line from Dallas east to the Atlantic and north.  We'll get up to an EF2 as a general rule, here.

I ran 5 miles, this morning.  It was 78 degrees with the same dewpoint.  It seems Mother Nature wants to give us one week of July temperatures before giving us the seasonal temp of 89 degrees.  97 degrees is the forecast high.

The 5 miles in the white 5's went almost completely pain free, for which I am thankful.  The splits weren't bad either after the first mile.  Cadence was at 160.  This week, I'm going to try to get almost back on schedule.  I'll have the weekend free, so I plan on going over to Brazos Bend State Park on Saturday to buy a one year park pass for $70 ($7 for each trip otherwise) and try to walk or run a few miles of the 50 mile course, if I can interpret the course map to the actual dirt.

5 miles, 1:07:35, 13:30 pace, 159 avg cadence, 0.75 m avg stride length
1.  14:06, 159 spm, 72 sl
2.  13:24, 160 spm, 75 sl
3.  13:22, 158 spm, 76 sl
4.  13:26, 159 spm, 75 sl
5.  13:16, 159 spm, 76 sl

I was huffin' more than I thought I should, but with splits less than 13:30, I guess that's okey dokey.  I was concentrating on hitting mid-foot, because I'm not convinced yet that the white 5's will be better than the blue 5's that has the collapsed medial side of the left shoe.  Time will tell and it could be the 4 hour walk that I did in the blue pair was the cause of the collapsed medial side.

Tuesday morning, I will try to venture out to the local high school to walk their track barefoot in the dark.  Not sure if it'll be locked up or what, but I'll give it a whirl.

As a complete aside, Friday I was making some chocolate fudge made with two bars of Ghiardelli 100%, 2 bars of 72%, some xylitol, and canned coconut milk.  I knew the measurements, but it turned out to be more like chocolate sauce, instead of fudge.  I figured out why, today, but BOY is that sauce excellent.  Filled halfway a 13x9 Pyrex pan.  VERY excellent with vanilla ice cream.

Now, I could add some creame de menthe and it would be some really excellent chocolate sauce.

This morning, I barefoot walked 4 laps of the track at the local high school.  I was thrilled that I didn't step on any acorns or little pebbles.  I finished shortly before the track team started their warmups at 6:15.  I came away with the bottom of my feet painted the color of the track and a new tennis ball from the tennis courts adjacent to the track.

It felt weird, but afterwards, walking in my 25 year old slippers seemed to have a new found sponginess.

I did acquire a 'hot spot' on the bottom of the left heel, left of dead center of the heel.

This is a photo I was trying to find, related to the 2005 evacuation of Hurricane Rita.  This is I-45 about 25 miles north of downtown and the time stamp in the lower right hand corner was 10:21 p.m. Northbound traffic on both sides of the freeway, plus the service road.  The camera is looking north.

ounce wrote:This morning, I barefoot walked 4 laps of the track at the local high school.  I was thrilled that I didn't step on any acorns or little pebbles.  I finished shortly before the track team started their warmups at 6:15.  I came away with the bottom of my feet painted the color of the track and a new tennis ball from the tennis courts adjacent to the track.

It felt weird, but afterwards, walking in my 25 year old slippers seemed to have a new found sponginess.

I did acquire a 'hot spot' on the bottom of the left heel, left of dead center of the heel.

Nice job! That "hot spot" is there to tell you that you need to work on your landing on that foot. You're putting shear stress on that part of your skin, and it doesn't like it. I've found it easier to learn barefoot while running, since it's easier to get your body to land in a more mid- to forefoot position. 

I saw that evacuation photo. Looks like a nightmare scenario.

Mark B wrote:

ounce wrote:This morning, I barefoot walked 4 laps of the track at the local high school.  I was thrilled that I didn't step on any acorns or little pebbles.  I finished shortly before the track team started their warmups at 6:15.  I came away with the bottom of my feet painted the color of the track and a new tennis ball from the tennis courts adjacent to the track.

It felt weird, but afterwards, walking in my 25 year old slippers seemed to have a new found sponginess.

I did acquire a 'hot spot' on the bottom of the left heel, left of dead center of the heel.

Nice job! That "hot spot" is there to tell you that you need to work on your landing on that foot. You're putting shear stress on that part of your skin, and it doesn't like it. I've found it easier to learn barefoot while running, since it's easier to get your body to land in a more mid- to forefoot position. 

I saw that evacuation photo. Looks like a nightmare scenario.

From reading the book "Fixing Your Feet," I know what the shear stress is.  I noticed the right foot had a bit of shear stress feeling, after a shower, but the left was worse.  No troubles, now.

About the evacuation photo, that was around mile marker 75 and Galveston is mile marker 0.  Those folks were screwed, blued, and tatooed.  There was NO traffic in town.  The photo was two days before the hurricane was supposed to have hit, yet scooted more east at the end.

Below was from Tuesday, Sept 20, 2005 when it was Tropical Storm Rita and it's 3 day outlook.  Seeing that it hasn't done its re-curve before getting to New Orleans yet (north then east), THAT was not a good scenario for Houston.

This morning, I ran over to the theater parking garage to do some ramps.  It was 74 degrees with 100% humidity, which is about 4 degrees cooler than Monday and not as humid (even though it was 100% humidity then, too).

The workout was almost three miles.  My first mile was around 13:23.  I was huffin' some, but it went fine.  Once I arrived at the ramp, I headed off.  It had been a year since I had done any incline work and I could just manage to do 1 ramp, today.  Not one floor, one ramp.  I guess that I could've done another ramp, but there was no absolute need.  So, I ended up climbing 7 flights of stairs twice before heading back home.

The second mile was around 13:59.  I don't know what the final .90 mile was.  The knee only squawked a bit in the first half mile, then was happy.

Friday should be a good day for a long run.  I don't know the distance yet, but probably something between 8-11 miles.  Thanks for stopping by.

The day and date for Hurricane Rita in 2005 is the same for 2016.
This image is the 'cone of uncertainty' for Wednesday, 24 hours after the one above.  Everybody started leaving Wednesday morning because of the memory of Katrina and what New Orleans went through.  By Wednesday afternoon, it would have sustained winds of 165 mph, a Category 5 hurricane, just like Katrina a month earlier.  It landed as a Cat 3 with 120 mph on Saturday morning at the TX/LA border.

Man, I hate hurricanes. I lived through Ivan in 2004 and would have lost my job if I had chosen to evacuate so I was sitting up with residents (nursing home) trying to keep them calm when it hit. It was crazy.  

Sounds like a nice humid run. I hope fall comes soon.