Well the glaring omission is that you apparently don't do any knee strengthening exercises even though your knees hurt? How do you expect to have strong knees

Well the glaring omission is that you apparently don't do any knee strengthening exercises even though your knees hurt? How do you expect to have strong knees without squats, lunges, etc? It's like saying you're bad at math and expect to magically get better at it, without actually practising math. Even doing a few sets of squats every day is better then nothing, and for some reason most newbie runners think they can do nothing, with zero sports background, and still run every other day.