Why does my Knee Hurt?

This post might resonate with a lot of readers who are into some kind of physical activity and in my case it would be running. After being physicallly inactive for around 3 yrs for various reasons (or well crafted ingenious excuses 🙂 ) I finally got up and decided to get back on track. Well there were a couple of reasons that jolted me out of my smooth easy life-style and the primary one being the realization that I was getting older. I could not abuse my body in the same way as I could a couple of yrs ago. Like it was pretty easy for me to skip meals for any reason earlier. But fast forward 5 yrs, I am 31 now, and my body has changed that I have to keep my stomach filled to a certain level all the time. This started happening a couple of months back. If I skipped a single meal I would get bad and I mean real bad headaches and then the only way out was to take a tylenol and hit the bed. Nothing else helped. For the first couple of times I could not figure out what was wrong and why was I getting these headaches keeping in mind that I have NEVER had any headaches in my life. Then I started corelating things and came to the conculsion that anytime my stomach was empty, it would do something to my body and head and it would be in a state that I needed food, rest and medicine to bring it back on track.
Has someone else felt or noticed anything like this with themselves or I must freak out and go see a doctor?
Anyways, so I have decided to start with things which I like the most or something which I have wanted to do for a long time and have just been procrastinating about them. I am actively trying to pick up running with plans to run a full marathon by the end of this year. Lets see how that goes. You can watch my progress on my running log that I maintain online at coolrunning.com by clicking the link on your right. So I went for my practice run which was close to 4 miles like 2 weeks back and then I think I overdid it or did something bad to my knee. I have been having such bad knee pains that it difficult to climb up and down the stairs. So I went on the web and started searching for what was going on with my knee and learnt a couple of things that I was doing wrong. I also found a very good website about the problem I think I am having. Its called runner’s knee or IBT (Iliotibial Band Syndrome). This entire website is dedicated to this problem and as I searched more on the net I discovered that it was something very common for new runner’s like me. I have also found a couple of very good stretching and muscle strengthening exercises (pdf doc) which I have been doing for the past couple of days and It does feel better. I at least dont have to limp when going up or down the stairs. But I dont think I can still go for my runs this weekend. I will try..maybe a 2 mile run..and increase it if I dont get any pains. Watch out my runners log or postings on my blog here for how it goes.