My IT band was bothering me yesterday. This really freaked me out because I've never had pain there before and I didn't know how to deal with it. After forgetting my shoes and my sports bra, I ended up missing that window of time after work when it's just cool enough to run, but still light enough that cars could see me on the side of the road. Whoops. Accidental rest day happened.
I noticed that my leg was still bothering me even as I was lounging around and it became clear that this IT band was not going to get better on its own. So I found a yoga tutorial for runners on YouTube, put on some meditative music, and got to work.
I was so stiff. I could hardly bend over, much less touch my toes. It was like several hundred miles, pressure at school, stress from work, and grad school applications had all been building up inside me all year and turned me into a petrified statue of tension. But by the end of that 20 minutes, not only was the IT band pain gone, I was so refreshed, mentally, emotionally and physically. I felt like I had just had a cathartic talk with a friend, gotten a massage, and woke up after a 4 hour nap, all at the same time.
Yoga, man. It's magic.
