PnP Knysna Forest Marathon

So the PnP Knysna Forest Marathon has come and gone. What an awesome experience. Before the run I pretty much thought I had this race all summed up.

I did the proper training and tapering. I did plenty of conditioning runs on Boyes Drive in Muizenberg (hills, hills and more hills) and spoke to a few people who ran the Knysna course before.

My nutrition was good, I was stocked up on UCAN Superstarch and coconut milk which worked like a charm on the run.

I was quite surprised at how well I felt at the 30km mark and was planning to speed up and hopefully run my target time of 4h 45mins. Up until that point there were lots of uphills and downhills which I managed well. But the last 10km was mostly steep downhill and that simply killed my knees slowing me down to a crawl. At times I thought I was going to do serious damage to my knees.
I eventually finished in 5h 12mins well over my target time but I was happy to finish!

I was pretty sure that I won’t be putting myself through that next year. The more I thought about it the more I wanted to go back and conquer that course. So now I have decided to take on Knysna again next year and fix my dodgy knees.

I recently read an article that claimed that barefoot running lessens knee pain. So as part of my weekly workouts I will be adding a 5 to 7k barefoot run. I’ve done one barefoot run so far and the experience was quite enjoyable. I have to run a short while on road to get to a park near I live. Running on the grass barefoot is quite relaxing.

I found that you have to pay attention more and rarely watch where you go or risk stepping on a sharp stone or something the local dogs left behind. And running barefoot is completely unlike shod running. There is more side to side action as you can’t simply step on or over something.
Barefoot running is one the therapies I am going to try. So lets see what happens!