Breakthrough and ITB

First the ITB.
I went to see the sport PT yesterday. My reputation has once again preceeded me. I have never met this lady but she knows a lot of people from the club. As soon as I walked in she asked me whether I rode my bike there because one of her clients on Friday told her that I would probably bike there since I am super crazy:) Oh course I biked there, I was not going to walk 9+ miles each way to get there. I just put on like 10 layers and it was all good:)

Basically she told me that it is definitelly my ITB and that those exercises I have been doing are good, they help to strengthen the hip stabilizers but they are not effectively transfering that strength to running. I need to do exercises that are activities in standing and look something like the movement pattern of running.
She showed me bunch of exercises and stretches to do.
She told me that she is not surprised that my ITB is irritated because for example when I stand on one leg it is horrible and that I better stop that until I learn to do it correctly because it is making it even worse.
She also said that I have a body of a cyclist- strong quads and relatively very weak abdominal muscles. Huh, must be all that riding my bike everywhere.
Also my standing posture is pretty bad, I tuck my butt in and non-activate my abs at all. Dang, seems like my mom was right all those years after all:)

So with these new exercises I should be all good in couple weeks/months. That time period is what I am saying, of course, but sounds reasonable to me. So my running enthusiasm and excitement is back:)

And now onto the breakthrough. Bike breakthrough, that is. My bike rides in past six weeks have been pretty much pathetic. HR too high and watts too low. One month ago my average watts for HR 150 were around 140watts. And sometimes it even seemed like I was going "backwards"- average watts going lower for a certain HR.
But last weekend (not my disastrous FTP test, but Sunday's ride) and rides this week were pretty good. Yesterday I did my long ride and my average power for 150HR was around 150 watts. So around 10 watts higher than one month ago! And this was the trend in last week so it probably was not a fluke!
It is exciting, isn't it?

Becoming a fat-burning endurance aerobic machine is probably not as important for short-course races as it was for IM training, but it is probably important in the greater scheme of things. So I will probably continue doing these 3h rides throughout winter.