The next morning, my knee was swollen, sore, and achy. As a physical therapist, I knew enough to suspect I had irritated the cartilage beneath my kneecap. The condition is so common among runners that it has a spectacularly obvious name: Runner’s Knee. It was irritating and painful, but not fatal to my chances; it wasn’t going to stop me. I had known ultrarunners to finish races as their kidneys were shutting down and they were losing control of their bowels. One veteran mountain runner, Joel Zucker, gutted out the last twenty miles or so of the 1998 Hardrock Hundred while suffering a
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