IT Band Woes

You guys, I am getting a little a lot frustrated by this injury nonsense.  I gave my leg about 10 days of rest after my IT band was bothering me last Friday (it flared up for the first time right about at mile 7 of the Princess Half Marathon...great timing!), but decided to give running a shot today.  I kept it really slow and easy, running just a minute at a time.  But still, after a mile, it was too much pain.  I just tried to do some foam rolling and totally gave up after 5 minutes because it was SO SO SO PAINFUL!  (I am a baby when it comes to pain, btw)

Okay, instead of wallowing in self-pity, here is my attempt to think positive:

• At least it's not another stress fracture/bone injury.  With the sfx, there was really nothing I could do except rest.  And rest.  And rest.  It still took forever to heal.  A muscle injury is much more likely to respond to rest + other treatments, like foam rolling and stretching.
• Maybe this is an excuse to go get another massage?  I have to admit, I got quite used to the life of luxury (aka 1 massage a week) I was living during half-marathon training to work on my knotty calf muscles.
• Hey, at least the calf muscles seem to be better!  (Although I'd almost rather be continuing to deal with the same issue than having a new injury every few weeks or so... :-/)
• No important races coming up  (I do have a few 5 & 10Ks, but I would definitely rather back out of those and heal so I can be all good to go when it's time to start training for the Rock & Roll Half-Marathon than run them and make the injury worse...)
• This happened after (well, during) Disney...I definitely would be way more upset if this had caused me to miss that race!

Plan: I might as well bite the bullet and call the doctor.  Idk what your experience is with seeing the doc for running injuries, but it's such a pain to have to go see my primary care doctor (who is not the most knowledgeable in sports med) and deal with a referral process...Especially since I am 99% sure he will tell me to rest and ice and come back in 4 weeks.  Although, now that I think of it, he was right on the money last August when I saw him complaining of "shin splints"--he thought of stress fracture right away!  But unfortunately ruled it out when I had a clean x-ray...silly me, not knowing at the time that stress fractures almost never show up on conventional x-rays.    Anyways, what harm would it do to see him again?  Maybe I can end up with a physical therapy referral or something...

Until then, I guess I'm going to keep on RICE-ing and for goodness sakes suck it up and just deal with the foam rolling pain...Oh, and start taking some good muscle supplements.  Please send healing vibes my way, if for no reason other than you are SICK of hearing about my injury after injury after injury...