Side knee pain

Question
Hi Nick,

I'm a fairly amateur runner. It been a year and a half since I began. This past summer I jumped from 5-7km runs to half marathons. The first went well, but my body was in rough shape after. The second was better on my body, but started a lot of pain issues for me.

Very early on due to some poor shoe choices (I suspect), I ended up with shin splints. I deal with them, however, despite stretching, they seem to be more frequent and painful now.

My second issue is a pain in my right knee (medial knee pain?), to the inside of the leg, which seems to be an odd spot. I was told by a doctor that my knee tracks funny and my patella could be hitting bone, but after researching it, I'm finding that to cause pain to the front of the knee. The pain first showed up around 13km into my second half marathon and now shows up rather early in any attempt to run. Even after a two month break from running it was happening about 3km into a run.

I love running, and I would really like to figure out if there are any exercises I can tackle or ways to treat this. I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere so sports therapists aren't an option. A guy at a sports store said maybe a compression knee brace would help, but I'm not sure how accurate that is. I'm sure it would mask some pain during a run, but long-term I can't see it doing much.

Thank you for your time.

Answer
Jen, Great job working hard running. Hopefully you can get these ailments to go away!

Are the shin splints on the outside or inside (medial or lateral)? I've done standing heel/calf raises with feet pointing in or out and seen it work magic for some shin splints. Typically for medial shin pain I have feet pointed in and for lateral have them pointed out.  

For general knee pain, I often recommend the clamshell exercise (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiqvDV8pzRk). If that doesn't help then describe to me more where exactly the pain is. Medial knee pain could be many things.

You can try a knee brace. I get very mixed results with that.