past few days

Rainy past few days made for a great trail run yesterday with 4 friends.  The trails were soft, puddles'a'plenty, and a light drizzle with about 48 degree weather.  just perfect for short sleeve shirt and shorts.
My IT band flared up just as soon as we hit a 200 yard flat section about 30 minutes in but the run was still great.  Karma loved it and slept all day long.

Session #5 of acupuncture was yesterday midday and other than spots all over my problem area, some in the other knee, the most unusual ones were one on the very tip of my left pinky toe (OUCH!  he even warned me that it would sting), and then one in my head/scalp/skull half way up between my left ear and the top of my head. It's not looking like acupuncture is gonna fix my issue, but I still believe in it's effectiveness for other things.  Further proof : A friend I ran with yesterday had acupuncture clear up allergies.  I'm going to go one last time tomorrow afternoon.

I've cranked up my stretching and ITBand excercises lately.  To be honest, i stopped doing them for a while, because after doing them for months on end with no results, you pretty much give up banging your head against the wall. However, I'm doubling up efforts now in a final attempt to get fixed before it's too late to get up to 26 mile shape for Boston in April.

Curious what stretches I'm doing?  There's an overlap in stretches within these videos, but add all the different ones up, and that's what I'm doing, 2 sometimes 3 times a day(if possible)
All 3 of these
Fast forward to 2:10 in this one
The last exercise in this one

In addition, I'm doing about a total of 120 slow motion squats and slow motion clams.   The squats are done with a ball(not tennis ball, bigger) rolling up and down on my back against a wall to keep the form correct.

Happy MLK day, every one.