A friend convinced him to try a joint support supplement with a simple challenge: take it daily for a month, then decide.
"The first week, nothing dramatic happened," he remembers. "Around day ten, I noticed I was walking down my stairs in the morning without grabbing the railing. A week later, I hiked a local trail I had been avoiding for a year because of the descent. I was nervous the whole time, waiting for my knee to explode. It never did."
Within eight weeks, he was running three times a week again on routes he had mentally crossed off.
"The biggest change was not just less pain. It was getting my world back. I started planning my life around what I wanted to do again, not what my knee might tolerate."