The Second Edition of Saving My Knees Is Out!

Here it is, with a new cover, new preface and five additional short chapters. Putting it together was more of an effort than I expected. Pardon me while I take a victory lap!

The first time, I formatted the book myself. It’s definitely doable, but tedious. I wrote out the steps last time, and on reviewing the process, I thought, “Eh, I’d rather skip this if I can find someone to do it for a good price.”

Did I ever. One of my luckier moments this summer was finding Allen of eB Format. He was responsive, intelligent, reasonably priced (less than $100) and did a nice job. He improved a few things without my asking. I said I’d mention his fine work on the blog, and his website’s here if anyone’s interested.

Now on to the book:

In the second edition, at the end I tried to answer a few criticisms that have surfaced – not that I’m really thin-skinned or anything, but for instance, when someone reads your book and likes it but can’t tell what you did to heal – well, that’s probably a failure of the writing or organization. By the way, if it’s unclear to anyone reading right now, I healed with high-repetition, low-load exercise, which for me was a very structured program of walking.

No fancy stretches, no miracle shoes, etc. Walking your way to health sounds simple, but there was a lot more to my story than that, which is what led to an entire book. I wanted to tell a story: of what happened to my knees, and how I got through it.

Which brings me to a second criticism: It would be a fine book, some readers have opined, if you could skip over the non-knee bits here and there, such as when, during my summer devoted to recovery, everything started going wrong, including my discovery of mold on my camera lenses. I completely understand this. Most people with knee pain just want answers. What do I do, what works, what doesn’t?

I conceived of this book as something different though: a story, with a central character (me) and a progression through the stages of knee pain, the experiments with things that didn’t work, and then the discoveries that led to healing.

Also, I thought it was useful to give readers an idea of what kind of person I am (competitive, type A, active, with a relatively injury-free history). That does figure into how I got into such a mess, and was related to the challenges of getting out. And the camera lens mold turned out to be part of a larger crapfest of a summer, and that turned out to be important too, because you will go through times like that when you have knee pain – every little bad thing that happens will seem like more grief dumped on you, and you’ll think that nothing will ever get better.

So there you have it. I also did the update because I wanted to include a chapter on Scott Dye and his “envelope of function” framework. I knew a little about Dye while writing the original book, but there was much, much more I only found out about later. I wish he could’ve been part of the first edition.

For first-time visitors wondering whether it’s worth their time and money: check out the blog. Poke around some. All the content here is free. If you like what you find, and want to find out the full story – well, Saving My Knees is it.

Cheers!

Update: I want to be clear that, if you bought the first edition, I'm not trying to suggest you buy the second too! That seems absurd. What's in the additional chapters (which are generally short) can be found around the blog (just do a search for "Scott Dye" for example; I talk about him in one of the add-on chapters). I will ask Amazon if people who bought the first can be automatically upgraded to the second, but I'm not optimistic Amazon will be able to do this.

Second Update: I reached out to Amazon. I was told that readers who bought the first edition could contact Kindle customer care, and someone there could help them download the latest version. A reader below in the comment section reports that this did work. Here are the url's Amazon gave me:
www.amazon.com/clicktocall
www.amazon.com/clicktochat