You should have to strengthen the core and hips.

Knee pain is one of the most common complaints that affects runners of all ages, regardless of a distance.

To identify the source of running injuries, you need to understand how human movement works. It seems that most runners with knee pain have a misunderstanding of human movement, which is possibly because they have little knowledge of connections between weak hips and runner's knee. To relieve knee pain or prevent knee injury, it is more important that you should spend lots of time building core and hip strength, rather than a focus on strengthening knee and thigh muscles because weak hips are the root cause of runner's knee injury.

"The HIP protocol resulted in earlier resolution of pain and greater overall gains in strength compared with the KNEE protocol."

An excerpt from NCBI (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/)

Therefore, it is very common to recommend a hip-strengthening program to runners wanting to consistently train injury-free.

Here is a series of core and hip exercises that will reduce the risk of knee injury.

• Hip Extension
• Hip Abduction
• Standing Hip Abduction
• Hip Flexion
• Standing Lunge