Pain in the ass

I have confirmation of my suspicions. I have thought for a few weeks now that I have an aggravated piriformis muscle. My suspicions arose when I logged onto runnersworld.com and looked through their injury prevention page. The piriformis stuff was usually titled "pain in the butt" so that was a bit of a giveaway. I've been struggling through it for about 3 weeks now. I started in pensacola, but was bareable, I thought it was from constantly running on hard surfaces. It got to the point however, where I couldn't bend at the waist, because the pain spread to my back. I stopped running, I biked and used the elliptical, but this only made it worse. I was waking up in pain, and got so pissed off that I went through the internet looking for solutions. They all said stop running.
I wasn't going to stop running.
If necessary, I could make city of oaks a "exercise in pain management" as ALow once put it. I can deal with that kind of pain, I don't want to...but I could if I had to. But aside from the same stretches I had been doing to no effect, one site said to ice it. DUH! how come I didn't think of that? So I walked (painfully) to the commissary about a mile away and bought some mixed veggies. I sat on them for 20 minutes of so and felt great afterwards. I can bend over to tie my boots! But this brings me to a subtopic:
We runners are a curious lot.
I'm sitting on bags of frozen vegetables. Lacking a foam roller, I used a broom stick to iron out my hamstrings. My roommates looked on with wonderment. They thought I had lost my mind. I do odd stretches at odd hours of the day(and night). But until they feel the pain that I do, the desire and drive that compels me to endure so that I can punish my body, they will fail to understand my love affair and ever increasing mastery of bipedal motion.