Fitness

I’m not a doctor, I can only speak from personal experience.

1. Stop running. Yeah, it sucks, but it won’t heal unless you do.
2. It’s going to take a couple months, probably, to be able to run on it again.
3. Walk, but only once pain is gone/very minimal.
4. RICE - rest, ice, compression, elevation.
5. You can try ibuprofen. It’ll help with inflammation.
6. Don’t start being active until pain is mostly/completely gone, and don’t start running until pain is gone. It WILL come back, and you’ll start all over again, if you start too soon.
7. Try other low impact activities like swimming.

Whenever you start back up, start really slow. I usually go with 1 slow mile for a couple weeks then start adding half a mile every couple weeks, depending how the injury feels. As much as it kills me, speed comes later, distance too.

If the pain isn’t gradually improving over the next week or two, then go see your doctor. From personal experience, they will just tell you to stop exercising.

You should talk to your doctor about it.

Edit: downvotes from salty individualists. You're not an expert. If you were, you'd give your expert opinion.

Seconding “talk to your doctor.” Although if I were in your situation I would just take a week off and try again.

Also, are you using a program like couch-to-5k? That has a bunch of walking parts to keep you from going too hard at first.

You may need to drop some ego and accept that you need to start slower and have patience to get to where you want to be.

I’ve found that doing weighted squats (I use the StrongLifts 5x5 barbell program) helps build my quads and glutes. That, in turn, helps my knees because those muscles take the strain off the knees when running. But that is probably more helpful once you are logging more miles.

Swimming is a good recuperative option. The worst I ever had such was just after the first marathon which was more run the first half, limp the second. Pay attention to what feels normal for you, I'm a 230+ LB person myself and have found that anything upwards of 10 miles starts really running the risk of being put down for a few days after. Good proper running shoes that fit your stride are a big factor too. If you're one to keep up on the ball of the foot having a high heel to it helps level out the impact, versus those that run more flat. There's a lot of weird mechanics to running, but at the start just taking a jog down the street and actively think about just how you run can give a lot of hints.

Try backwards walking, and when the pain has gone away try tibialis raises. Strengthening the tibialis will help handle the impact from running

Obviously, it’s impossible to know from here, but I had a knee flare up that took ages to recover from. I couldn’t run and walking, getting up/down from chairs was painful.

The thing that helped was seeing a physio. I’d tried all kinds of voodoo (neoprene supports, etc) before that, and postponed recovery.

She got me to stretch, stand on one leg, etc and watched how I moved. Eventually, she gently pushed her thumb onto the inner side of my knee cap—OUCH, THAT’S IT! It was immensely painful, but I realised that all the nagging pain was from this very specific area. It wasn’t like normal pain, where the source hurts most and it’s obvious what’s wrong and where it is.

She gave me some self-massage and stretch exercises, which helped. I still do them for a couple of minutes a couple of times a week, just to prevent a comeback.

I have gone through a similar thing. I cannot run due to being old and having really bad knees. I can, however, walk a lot, which is something I enjoy very very much. I recently hurt my foot and really can't walk for the time being beyond just day to day stuff......no five mile walks for the foreseeable future.

I'd recommend finding new exercises that don't aggravate your knee for now. My foot injury has got me back into lifting weights (nothing crazy, more reps than massive weight) and having a new situp / pushup routine every morning. I've been enjoying my newly acquired extra upper body strength.

Sorry about your knee. I hope you have a fast recovery