Stalker

It's snowing horizontally outside. Some snowflakes are actually doing somersaults before gleefully whipping people across the face. Sadistic little monsters. The wind chill factor prognosis for the day was -16, so I dressed up warm before I headed out.

Last Wednesday it was a different matter:

Plus 7 degrees and a filthy soup consisting of wet snow and dirt. Still, I happily rolled up the cuffs of my tights and basked in what felt like spring sunshine.

When I started running just before 8 this morning, the wind was still but a gentle whisper. But by the time I had met up with AIK and we ran eastwards, it was howling like a wolf at the moon and throwing buckets of frozen snowflakes in our faces. But did I care? Did I feel sorry for myself? No. Because I was so, SO happy that my knee felt ok. Since the disastrous run last Saturday, it had been giving me warnings all week that not all is well in the kingdom of Shaman, and that if I didn't heed its warnings it might turn into an ugly, terrifying monster: a full-blown runner's knee.

Remember the last time I suffered from runner's knee? Not that long ago. Put an end to any serious running plans I might have been hatching last year. I thought it was a distant memory by now, yet here it was, showing up at my doorstep at 4 in the morning, drunk and wanting to hook up. I slammed the door in its face. Asked it to never call or try to see me again. Stretched it, massaged it, rested. But it's a persistent little stalker that knows no personal bounds.

So as we ran on, I kept listening for those warning signs, but apart from a couple of times when it felt like the knee had popped out of its joint, it kept quiet. I was so thankful to be logging some much needed kilometres. Then I left the others and turned south, because I had to pick up some contact lenses I had ordered. The wind had turned, so I had to meet it head on again, and it was now screaming hysterically, like a B-movie actress about to get murdered with a chainsaw. It was around this point when my knee woke up from its slumber and demanded to have a word with me. Apparently it didn't much like the soft surface that the blanket of fresh snow was creating on the pavements, because it made it feel like it had to work hard to stabilize the rest of my body.

I picked up my lenses, which proved to be entombed in an enormous box that could fit into my backpack about as easily as thirty obese elephants in a Mini. Had I been a human being gifted with the most basic level of intelligence, I would have taken the lenses out of the gigantic box and put them in my backpack, but my brain was obviously in denial and pretending it was on holiday in a much warmer, drier country, so I carried the box in my arms the rest of the way home. My knee didn't like that either. A couple of hundred meters from home, it decided that enough was enough and gave up.

I'm now spoiling it by giving it massage, stretching, icing and anti-inflammatory pills, the whole knee spa treatment. But it's so grumpy that I'm afraid it's going to take a while before it's willing to take me running again. I should have known. No way I can run 30 km and think it's going really well without some sort of backlash.