Latest on Hamlin’s Knee

From Denny Hamlin's driver diary at USA Today: "Knee surgery was more than a month ago, but I still am going to rehabilitation almost every day if I'm in town. It's going well, but the recovery is so slow is what's frustrating. It's not like anything else. You can break a bone or sprain something, and it can get better in a couple of weeks. This is a long, long process of putting in a whole bunch of work, and I wish the results were faster. The rehab mostly involves squats and stuff to try to get the quad and calves strong again. They get very weak being laid up, and they don't fire as well anymore, which in turn gives you more knee pain. So I'm doing the normal leg exercises that anyone would do to build muscle. It's better every week, for sure, but not 50% better, it's 10% or 5% better. It's about a six-month recovery, and we're a month into it. The doctors have said we're ahead of schedule. I still can't run, and that's the biggest limiting factor. I can't get the cardio exercise as I'd like, so that part also is a bear to deal with. I can get to where I'm on the elliptical machine now and can make some rotations. Within a week, I figure I'll be back to some sort of cardio, but nothing sports-related. The biggest thing I hear from people who do this in sports all the time is part of the depression that athletes face is not being able to go to the gym and do things as they did before. We live in the gym and live to play sports and do stuff like this. Being told to sit on the couch to recover is tough to deal with." USA Today