The knee

What you’ve described — pain on the outside of the right knee, not sharp, tolerable while running, most noticeable walking afterwards, arriving since you started running again — is the single most recognisable presentation in distance running. It looks most like iliotibial band syndrome. I want to be careful with that word: I can’t examine you, and lateral knee pain also comes from the patellofemoral joint, the popliteus tendon, the biceps femoris insertion and the lateral meniscus. But the pattern fits ITB well, the plan below is the right first move for most of those causes anyway, and the tests in the next block will sharpen the picture considerably.

One thing worth separating: this is probably not the same problem as the deep-squat pain and clicking from your old plan. That was anterior and load-related. This is lateral and volume-related. Treat them as two files.

Three tests, five minutes, do them today

Point to it with one finger. If the sorest spot sits on the bony bump on the outside of the thigh just above the joint line, roughly 2–3 cm above the knee crease, that’s the classic ITB location. If it’s on the joint line itself, or behind it, that points elsewhere — note which.
Stairs. Going down is the discriminator. ITB and patellofemoral pain both dislike descending; ITB tends to bite at around 30 degrees of knee bend. Note whether down is clearly worse than up.
Single-leg squat, filmed from the front. Stand on the right leg, phone on the floor, bend to about 45 degrees, five slow reps. Then the left for comparison. Watch for the right hip dropping on the non-standing side, or the right knee drifting inward over the big toe. That collapse is what loads the outside of the knee, and it is exactly what the hip block below fixes.

What actually works, and what doesn’t

Two things you’ll be told to do that are largely a waste of your time. Stretching the IT band — it is dense fascia anchored along the femur, with a tensile stiffness closer to tendon than muscle. You are not lengthening it with a standing lean-over. Foam rolling the IT band itself — the current understanding is that the pain comes from compression of a richly innervated fat pad underneath the band, not from friction, so grinding the band down onto that structure is painful and mechanistically backwards. Roll the tensor fasciae latae at the front of the hip, the outer quad, and the glutes instead. That’s defensible and it feels better.

Three things that do work, in order of evidence:

Hip abductor and external rotator strength. Runners with lateral knee pain reliably test weaker in hip abduction on the affected side, and structured hip strengthening resolves symptoms in the large majority within about six weeks. This is the main intervention and it’s the daily block below.
Cadence. Raising your step rate by 5–10% reduces hip adduction and the strain on the band, at zero fitness cost. Count your steps for 30 seconds on an easy run, double it. If you’re under about 165 per minute, aim to add 5% and hold it on easy runs only. A metronome app or a 170 bpm playlist does the job.
Terrain. Downhill running is the worst possible stimulus for this, and cambered roads are the second worst — the leg on the low side of the camber sits in extra adduction all run. Your August-to-October treadmill default is genuinely lucky here: a belt has no camber and no downhill. When you move outdoors in November, alternate which side of the road you run on.

About these videos

Every one is checked to resolve — bun run verify:videos re-checks all 29 against YouTube and fails on a dead link or a channel that does not match the card. The channel is named so you can judge the source before you watch. The knee and hip work is deliberately physiotherapist-led — Physiotutors, Physio REHAB, Hinge Health and Revo — because form matters most on the movements you are doing for an injury. The gym lifts come from general strength channels, which is fine for a barbell.

Tiles play in place: nothing loads a player until you press one, so YouTube sets no cookies on you before you choose to watch. Every card also keeps an Open on YouTube link in case an embed is blocked.

Offline, the thumbnails survive but the players do not. The tiles are cached, so the page still looks like itself with no signal; pressing one needs a connection. Every word, table and number works untouched either way. Watch each new movement once before its first session, then stop watching and do the work.

What to expect, and when

Consistent hip work changes this on a scale of four to six weeks, not days. You should see the after-run walking ache shrink first, then the in-run awareness. Judge it at week 4, not week 1.

Running is not cancelled — it is capped

You are on on-ramp week B, not week 2 of the block, which means you have three weeks of slack before the 16-week plan even starts. Use it. Repeat week B rather than progressing to C, and hold the long run at 9 km until the after-run ache shrinks. The specific thing to watch with this condition is the distance at which it arrives: if it turns up at 7 km this week and 5 km next week, the volume is winning and you cut, regardless of how mild the pain is at the time.

Stop pushing through and get it looked at if

The pain becomes sharp, or arrives earlier in each successive run.
The knee swells, catches, locks, or gives way — that combination points at the meniscus and no amount of glute work addresses it.
Four weeks of consistent hip work produces no change at all.
It starts hurting during ordinary walking rather than just after running.

You said you’d prefer to fix it, and you’re right to. An annoyance at 24 km a week is frequently a season-ender at 60. The cheap moment to deal with this is now, while running volume is still low.

The other thing from that run — the numb foot

Separate problem, almost certainly benign. Numbness that builds mid-run, does not resolve on loosening the laces, then eases the longer you run and is gone afterwards is the signature of lace pressure on the nerves crossing the top of the foot, not a nerve pathology — feet swell during a run, more so in this heat. Skip-lace over the high point of the midfoot: take the laces straight up the sides for one eyelet instead of crossing over the sore spot. Then check shoe size — running shoes want a half to a full size above street size. If the numbness sits between the third and fourth toes and burns, that is a different pattern and needs a wider toebox rather than looser laces. Recurring on three consecutive runs after the lacing change means get the foot looked at.