Your Journey
Your words on the kick-off call, back in April.
"If I put load in it, it'd be screaming."Week one — a knee you'd guarded for five years.
Where you are as an athlete. Faint is your start. Solid is now. The dashed line is your potential, what the performance phase is for.
Why the potential matters
Fewer injuries. The stronger you get, the harder you are to break. Strength training cuts runners' overuse injuries to around half, and you came in with one side quietly compensating for the other.Lauersen et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine
Faster, for less. More strength, power and speed improve your running economy, so the same pace costs less energy and you can hold it for longer.Systematic reviews, Sports Medicine
The payoff. That symmetry and durability is exactly how you get to the start line of a November marathon — on a knee that's been an issue for five years.
You're in the Bridge phase — building back to full running and impact. One quad deficit to close first.
Last week was frustrating. The leg extensions flared and it felt like the knee wasn't moving. So we tested everything — and the data said the opposite: three of four lower-limb standards already at or above where they need to be. The knee isn't damaged. A quad that switched off years ago is waking back up. Resetting and trusting the data, instead of the bad day, is the whole game.
1 · Close the quad gap. Leg-extension work three times a week, pain kept at 0–2/10, until the right quad fires like the left. Everything else is already at standard.
2 · Bring running back. The engine never left — ski and bike intervals have kept you fit. Once the quad holds load, running returns fast.
3 · Build to November. Then a steady block of run volume on a knee that finally takes load — all the way to the marathon start line.
4 quick questions. Tells you where to start, and how deep to go.
So I know whose audit I'm looking at.