Conundrums

I'm not sure if it's the bad weather stealing my energy or the fact that I've been exercising for 14 (!) days in a row without a day's rest (I hadn't noticed that little factoid), but today's strength training went...not so well. The plank challenge, which I've been slavishly following for the past 3 weeks and which -as the name suggests- was a challenge but one that has suited me so far, almost knocked me out both yesterday and today. 

My weakest body parts have had to do some work in yesterday's plank: intervals of 10 seconds on your elbows, then 10 on straight arms repeated over 2 minutes. Repeated times three (although I could only do two rounds and then switched to the basic plank). The change from one position to the other made my pathetic excuse for arms ache and my sensitive wrist play up. Today's challenge was tabata intervals on the balance board, while bringing each knee to the opposite elbow. Needless to say, I didn't manage to engage the stomach muscles as much as I should. I'm not sure I engaged them at all.

In other my-body-hates-me news, the back of my knee, where the tendon of the thigh muscle meets the tibial bone, thinks I've been overdoing it with barefoot running and is sore to the touch. And I've been touching it a lot. Just to make sure that it still hurts. I'm suspecting that pressing it all the time might actually be making it hurt. The plan is to cut back a little on barefoot running, maybe by two minutes, and replace it with brick-shoe running. The conundrum is that barefoot running is really good for my runner's knee (which is doing so well by the way that I almost forgot I had it); but it seems to be putting a lot of pressure on the tendon. A lose-lose situation?