imbalance

My left knee hurt on my run today, so did my left IT band, and my left hip.  My left hip/butt area is the weak spot in my body, where all my running injuries tend to originate.  The knee pain is caused by a tight IT band, which itself is caused by a lack of strength and flexibility in my left hip flexor.  I can feel on my runs lately that my gait is becoming a little lopsided and right-leg dominant. 

My aversion to stretching originates in a feeling that when the run ends, I should turn my attention to more important matters.  My aversion to cross training is that I'd rather run, because after all, I think, you get better at running by running.  Tammi warns that this attitude leads to injury and diminishing returns on training.  I cut my run short by 20 mins today to focus on stretching and strengthening, which I'll turn to after I blog.  My left-side weakness figuratively bit me in the ass when I first started back into serious running a little less than four years ago, with a nasty case of piriformis syndrome, and while I've been lucky to have more or less avoided being sidelined with injury since, if I don't attend to this my neglect of stretching will once again figuratively bite me in the ass.  There's a lesson in all of this anatomy, somewhere, about our character flaws.