Wish I could kick my low knee in the hiney

So after feeling pretty good over the weekend and during Tuesday's workout, I had pretty high hopes for running on Wednesday. This was the first run of week 5 of the program, which had three 5 minute running intervals. I woke up and my knee had no pain, so my mindset was good heading out to the park.  I decided to run at a park closer to my house, one that has a sidewalk trail around a field that measures about .35 miles. I started out walking and felt a little stiff, then ran the first interval. I couldn't seem to get my form and stride right, I just felt tight. Then when I slowed to a walk ... BAM my knee started screaming at me. Each step was painful and it didn't get much better through the 3 minute walk. When it came time to run again I started, but after less than a minute my body just stopped running. I was so frustrated I wanted to scream. Of course I was at the far corner of the park so I walked it back around to the entrance, sat on a bench and berated myself for a bit. It was really disheartening. Here I was, less than 12 hours after planning 12 months of races and now I can't even run for 5 minutes without pain.

I've decided that I'm going to take a week off of running completely. I'm going to replace those runs with workouts on the elliptical and continue to do strength training to try to strengthen the muscles in my leg around my knee. My legs didn't feel too badly for the rest of the day Wednesday, but today they were really sore all day long, even after 3 advil. I didn't do any exercise today, but I'm going to hit the gym tomorrow. I'll see how things feel after a week.  Worse comes to worse, I'll just run/walk the 5K in October. Maybe I still need to lose more weight before my body is going to be able to stand running again. I'm still 275 pounds and that's a lot of pressure on weakened joints.  So I'll keep eating right and continue non-impact exercise to increase my fitness and we'll see where this goes. The most frustrating part is that I feel fit, my heart and lungs aren't giving me a problem at all.