Kirkbride Half Marathon

My first post in a month, because nothing too much has happened in my world of running since my parkrun PB at the beginning of June.  This morning though was the Kirkbride Half Marathon, so that's gotta be worth a mention!  Although nothing much has happened for a month, there is one thing I want to say first, because it massively impacted this run.  As I mentioned before, my right knee hurt for the last 10 or so miles of the Manchester Marathon and took a week or two to recover.  I have knee niggles every now and again, and after a fairly long run a couple of weeks ago it was quite sore afterwards.  But it hurt after I stopped and got home.  Not hurting much during the run, but definitely hurting just sitting on the couch watching sport!  Ok, retired life is mainly running in the morning and watching sport on TV in the afternoon.  A tough life 😁.  This happened two or three times over the last month, and recently I did a 12k run, walked up a hill and then tried to run slowly back.  But my knee was too sore, despite it being fine in the 12k!  That last one made me think about the knee problem in the marathon.  I was tired after 25k or so, and there were a few stops for drinks or the toilet, and I think the knee started hurting after restarting from those stops.  I'm not completely sure about my memory of the marathon, but I am pretty sure that was the situation.  The clear inference is that if I can keep running for the whole race, the knee won't hurt until after the race is finished!!  My experience has been that the pain after a restart can last quite a while, and at home it tends to last the rest of the evening.  But it feels ok the next day!  My new knee-plan is obviously to simply keep running during a planned race/run and then not run after stopping!  I am adapting that slightly to say that maybe runs of 8k or less are ok to restart.  I run to parkrun and stop.  Then do parkrun and stop.  then run back.  That seems fine, but the distances are 3, 5 and 3 km. But restarting after 12k is problematic, and my guess is that 10k, or perhaps even 8k, would be an issue.  Today's half-marathon was clearly well over 8k, 10k and 12k, so my plan was to do it without any stops at all, even for water, unless bad knee pain.  I was very tired after about 8 miles today, and I had a few knee niggles, but nothing awful,  so I kept going.  I had one water around half way, but without stopping.  And, as expected, within two minutes of finishing, just walking to the car was very sore.  Getting in to the car, and getting my knee and calf protectors off my leg, was difficult and painful for my knee.  Even sitting at home watching TV in the afternoon (England losing an Ashes test 😭) was painful on my knee.  And I have to go up and down stairs one leg at a time, or it's too sore.  This was all expected.  I finished the half marathon, and I hope that by tomorrow my knee will be back to 'normal'.  We'll see, but I like the new plan so far!!  My half marathon time was about 1:53, and although that is slow, I am very pleased that I managed to get under two hours!  It's good to have an achievable goal for a change 😁.