The following is not intended as advice or recommendations to anyone who may have the same or similar problems I describe below.

April 26th, 2010
     I've gone through quite an ordeal with my knees over the past few months. As any one who has read these posts in the past knows, I lost the cartilage in both knees to arthritis fifteen years ago. I opted not to have knee replacements as the doctors had suggested and instead began to experiment with ways to run/jog/walk that wouldn't make things worse. Back in those days people with my condition were told to curtail their walking and definitely not to run.
     But I gradually discovered that walking/jogging such as I was doing not only didn't make my condition worse but actually made it better. I developed a sort of shuffle/jog which would put the least amount of stress possible on my knees, contented myself to slow down from the 8 1/2 minute miles I'd been doing to 13 -- 15 minute miles, and instead of doing 4 miles I settled on 2 1/2 miles a day. Over the next few years I increased my daily distance to 3.2 miles.
     Then in 2006, on a trip Jane and I took to visit our youngest, Jim II, and his family in Washington State, I decided to try 3.5 miles and found there was no additional pain. I gradually increased my distance until by 2007 I was doing 4, 5, and 6 miles a day. That was the highest mileage year I'd ever had, logging over 1,100 miles.
     But it came at a price. On January 1st of this year I awoke to find I couldn't even walk across the floor without help. Jane brought me a light, plastic chair and I used it as one uses a walker. I stayed in bed for 2 days, then gradually began to walk around the house until my knees began to feel better. On January 5th I walked a couple miles and did it again the next day, then on the 7th I did 3 miles. The 3 miles was a mistake.
     I finally had to admit to myself that the answers I thought I'd found for my knees were no longer the right answers. I went back over my running logs for the past several years and searched for clues as to what had happened. I finally had to admit that the problem was my own ego; I'd been so proud of myself for all those miles I was doing that I didn't notice as the months passed that my times were gradually getting slower. I'd learned when my knees first went bad that I could no longer pay attention to how long it took me to do each mile; distance was now the only important thing and I only kept track of my times as a general indication of my conditioning. My pain level dictated how fast I would jog and I tried to keep it around 2 - 4 (on a pain scale of 1 - 10). But the slowing of my times was, in retrospect, a sign that my knees were getting worse, that the pain was increasing and causing me to gradually slow down. The climax of this was my condition on January 1st, 2010. Happy New Year to me.
     I began searching the web for newer research, and not research which had been paid for by the pharmaceutical companies; as my doctor revealed to me one day, the drug companies demand the research for which they’re paying prove to the public they have to take the company’s expensive prescriptions. My doctor then added, "Ditto for research paid for by the American Medical Association."  The fact that exercise actually helped reduce pain and increase mobility in arthritic joints like mine was denied by the pharmaceutical companies and the AMA in order to sell prescription drugs which often do more harm than good, and to keep folks paying for unnecessary visits to doctors' offices.
     I finally found some interesting, new information; special exercises to strengthen my thighs and legs, new jogging postures, ways to vary my distance, speed and stride, and many other new, constantly-changing techniques which -- along with making myself stay with only 1 mile a day -- began to show real improvements by the end of January
     Flash-forward to April 25th; I'm now doing 2 - 3 miles a day and occasionally 3.2 or 3.5. I've even tried 4 miles on a couple days and so far my knees are doing very well. But I do my exercises every day, and I pay close attention to what my knees, as well as the rest of my body, is telling me about what I'm doing out there and adjusting whatever/whenever is necessary.
     So, why do I keep doing the miles at age 72? Back in the 1970s before I started running I became concerned that I could never catch my heart rate (my pulse) lower than 81 beats per minutes. And that was first thing in the morning before I’d even gotten out of bed. I’d read somewhere that a person’s heart only has so many beats it can do before it stops beating and the faster it beats – the more beats per minute – the fewer years the person could live.
     My heart rate these days in the morning before I get out of bed is 49 - 54 beats per minute. Even when I’m up and moving around my heart stays between 55 – 62 beats per minute. (Right now, as I’m writing this my pulse is 56.) Even when I’m jogging my heart rarely gets above 100 beats per minute, due to the fact that my knees won’t allow me to go fast enough to get my pulse up to my optimum rate (118 beats per minute).
     So, let’s see: Let’s say my heart averages 60 beats per minute these days, that’s at least 20 beats per minute less than it was before I started doing the miles, times the number of minutes in a day, which is 1,440, multiplied by those 20 beats per minute comes to 28,800 beats I’m saving every day. That number times 365 days in a year comes to 10,512,000 (ten million five hundred twelve thousand) beats saved year.
     Now: Take the number of beats saved every year and multiply it by the number of years I’ve been running – which is more than 31 years – and I’ve potentially saved my heart 325,872,000 beats (three hundred twenty-five million, eight hundred seventy-two thousand).
     But, that only comes to around 3.1 extra years I've added to my life expectancy....so, was it worth it?  I think it was.  And there's a multitude of other health benefits of regular exercise, too.
     I'm sure it's very obvious that my ego is still a major part of my exercise discipline, so I may as well go the rest of the way:
        Total number of miles I've done is:  20,675 miles.
        (By the way, that's the equivalent of doing a mile and three-quarters a day, every day of every week of every month of every year since I started on January 1st, 1979.)
       That's like running/jogging/etc., from Los Angeles to New York City 7 times, and then from New York City back to Cookeville, Tennessee.  No wonder I feel tired sometimes!
     Okay, so it’s probably a healthy lifestyle; now if I just don’t get hit by a car when I’m out jogging... –-Jim Glaser, 04/26/2010