Injured! Again/Still

So.  I think I have complained on here before about an IT band injury - my troubles started in the winter of 2010, when Caroline decided to run a marathon.  Naturally I had to start training as well.  Things went fine for a few weeks, and then all of a sudden (as is apparently common with IT band injuries) I couldn't run. At all.  A few months of physio therapy and exercises was enough to get me running again.  I could now run...wait for it... 1.2 kilometers without pain.

So the marathon was out.

This seemed to be my plateau for the rest of the summer.  In the fall of 2010 I decided to take a strategic rest from running at all to let it fully heal (read: I gave up).  Then in 2011 I signed up for the Sun Run again, so got back on the horse with a different physiotherapist and back into training.  This seemed to work - I ran 6 k in the Sun Run totally pain free, and in the months afterward was able to build it to 8 or 9 easily.  This was great news.

Fall came around and we signed up for a run clinic. The first few weeks were tough on my knee, but each week was slightly better - I could run faster and longer.  We took a break from Vancouver to go down to Moab, where I took an unscheduled dismount on our last day of riding.  My knee acted up again on the return, but I put this down to the dismount injury messing up all of the muscles.  A few weeks went by, the leg seemed to heal, and suddenly I could finish an entire track workout.  Faster than I had even been, and without pain at all.

The next week I went back to track, and within 400 meters of the warm up, my right knee IT band started to hurt.  Excruciating, actually.

Did I mention that up until now, from February of 2010, it had been the left knee?

So it appears that I am back to the beginning. The plan is to take a 2 week hiatus over the Christmas break, and then start running again in the park outside of our house.  The park is 400m around, so the first day I will run around it once.  The next day, twice.  And so on.  It will be like my own hamster wheel.

Anyways. I am completely exasperated.  But at the same time am feeling fairly good about this new plan of easing into it, and hopefully starting the right treatment immediately.

This is supposed to be a photo-heavy blog, but complaining is hard to take a picture of.  So since I mentioned Moab, here are a few more of my favourite pictures from the trip.  These I shot in HDR.  I was really proud of all the work I had put into them (tripod, multiple exposures, processing them individually back at the computer, etc), but then I saw that some new point and shoots now have an HDR mode which will probably do a better job than I can, without any work at all.  I'll save that complaint for another post though.

If anyone is interested, here is wikipedia's take on what seems to be my main adversary in this story.

Bottom line: "IT Bands: the worst thing in the world."