Discovering My ITBs

I had a session with my PT today (can I be the 1 billionth person to point out that personal trainer and personal torturer have the same initials?!) to go over my 16 week training schedule to get me ready to complete the Lake Taupo Challenge (eep). Actually it's quite good to have it all down on paper laid out week by week as I know from half-marathon training that you can just work through the training week by week and know that as long as you get it done you're heading towards a successful outcome. Anyway today being Monday it was my core and stretch session, the core workout didn't look too challenging on paper (although I discovered that there's a good reason the set of Catapults is only 12 as they're only easy for about the first 3). The stretching included instructions to roll my ITB with a foam roller. Apparenly the ITB does a lot of work when cycling and is prone to injury later on if not looked after early. Now personally I couldn't pick my ITB out of a line up - I had a vague idea of where it sort of was (which turned out to be wrong), but hey, that's ok, how hard can it be to roll anything on a foam roller.... famous last words. PT demonstrated by lying on aforementioned roller and gracefully gliding up and down so that it rolls from hip to knee and back in a fluid movement. I attempted the same - hmmm, firstly owwwww! Ok now I know where my ITB is, and also that it hurts like f**k to roll up and down on a foam roller on top of it. Apparently this is an indication that they are already showing signs of stress (and not, as the more sane of us might think that rolling up and down on them is a crazy thing to do). Apart from the pain the whole gracefully gliding up and down the roller thing totally eluded me, I think I looked like a large injured duck that lies miserably on the side of a road flapping various bits of wing and leg forlornly. Yup, go the ITBs !