The body is an amazing but baffling thing. Millions of years of evolution have given us things like thumbs, essential for opening jars of olives and texting a mate to say you’re running late. We can stand up straight and run fast (well some of us can) for a bus. But there’s still a few chinks in the design.

The IT band that runs from hip to knee and is there to stabilise us as we run is a tricky little fellow. And if it’s not happy it will make this known to you, often in the shape of a pain that feels like nails are being hammered through your knee.

Such a situation happened to me before Christmas. A consultation with a physio had told me that the mild pain I was feeling in my knee was because of an unhappy IT band. I was given some exercises to do to strengthen my glutes.

A spot of cycling on a bike with a seat set too low and a couple of long runs later and my knee was agony running, walking and going downstairs. So I took to the internet.

The internet is another marvelous thing. It can deliver the whole of collective human knowledge to your palm in an instant, along with pictures of cats and videos of drunk people falling over. But it can also deliver you a whole lot of misinformed drivel.

So as not to add my unaccredited and unprofessional advice to the pile of web pages marked ‘drivel’, instead I will tell you where I went, the advice I took from the interweb and how it helped me. This was all in addition to getting advice from a real life physio who watched me run and assessed me.

• First up I read the article How Do I Get Rid of IT Band Syndrome? from the US Competitor magazine. I was happy to read that “a long layoff won’t do anything to loosen a tight ITB”. So following the advice in the article I stretched three times a day: at home, at work, visiting friends, anywhere. I kept at it and gradually it helped. Importantly I kept running little and often and gradually built up the miles.
• I added a few more strengthening exercises to my arsenal and I did these too, without fail.
• I read what Tom, a physio I know through twitter, had to say about ITBS. From his advice I tried running faster, running off road and popped a hot water bottle on my thigh – something that made more sense than ice in trying to relax the problem area.

From not being able to run for a mile without the pain flaring up, I can now run six miles painfree. I’m now starting marathon training, something I thought might be impossible a few weeks back. We’ll have to see how the IT band holds up as the mileage climbs, but I’m feeling confident that if I keep the stretches and exercises going, I’ll be OK..