I have consistently run 30-40 miles a week for the past 5+ years, and been staying active for more than 22 years. This is more about time on my feet (10-12 hours) going at my moderate old man pace with vertical gain thrown in. (Not to brag but also to brag 2025 was 1,794.8 miles and 439,574 vertical feet). This was in part how I survived Amazon - it was my therapy, my stress relief and my way of not just keeping me in shape but giving me something outside of work to focus on. And I’ve been quite disciplined - always run in the morning before work. Get up and go. Have a 7 am meeting and 90 minute run on the schedule? Well just have to get up at 4:30 am, and start running by 5 am in order to shower and dial in for the 7 am meeting from home.
I didn’t expect anything to change when I retired - and it didn’t I stayed in my routine and followed my weekly plan. Though I did shift from getting up at 4:30 am to getting up at like 7 am ;) But I did have more time on my hands. I have a bunch of projects (like organizing 100s of thousands of digital files and rebuilding my website with Claude Code). And that meant that I could also do some “chores” around the house.
Two of those activities were splitting big Doug Fir rounds for firewood. This involved moving heavy rounds in place, splitting them with a maul and a sledge hammer and then splitting them into smaller pieces with an axe and then stacking. Another was me deciding to cut down a Japanese Spindletree that grew next to our house. The Spindletree is really a bush and it had grown 20+ feet tall and it was continually dropping leaves and I found it annoying. So I cut it down.
See it has like 6 trunks? And that wood was super dense, wet and full of water. I cut it down mostly with my electric chainsaw (which is not really suited for this task) and then I cut off the branches and carried very heavy logs (sometimes with Miles help) down to the back forty for them to decompose.
And then on one run I also jumped off of a downed tree on Old Griz and hit the ground.
Somewhere in between all of that I strained my right quad. When I ran uphill or downhill I could feel a pain deep in my right quad about 4 inches above my knee. And then as part of the healing / injury process my knee swolled up with extra fluid and I couldn’t bend my knee. And that has been about a little over a month now - and things are very slowly slowly getting better. My bike ride in the glorious 70 degree sunshine yesterday felt great and today’s run felt pretty ok.
So I am sure that eventually things will get back to normal; but a good lesson that having more time on your hands and doing more might not always be the best thing. ;) And talking to Koop - he said this is not the first time he has had this happen. So be on the lookout how you change up your training and activities.