creating a column which keeps a running count of consecutive values

You can use the compare-cumsum-groupby pattern (which I really need to getting around to writing up for the documentation), with a final cumcount:

>>> df = pd.DataFrame({"binary": [0,1,1,1,0,0,1,1,0]})
>>> df["consec"] = df["binary"].groupby((df["binary"] == 0).cumsum()).cumcount()
>>> df
   binary  consec
0       0       0
1       1       1
2       1       2
3       1       3
4       0       0
5       0       0
6       1       1
7       1       2
8       0       0

---

This works because first we get the positions where we want to reset the counter:

>>> (df["binary"] == 0)
0     True
1    False
2    False
3    False
4     True
5     True
6    False
7    False
8     True
Name: binary, dtype: bool

The cumulative sum of these gives us a different id for each group:

>>> (df["binary"] == 0).cumsum()
0    1
1    1
2    1
3    1
4    2
5    3
6    3
7    3
8    4
Name: binary, dtype: int64

And then we can pass this to groupby and use cumcount to get an increasing index in each group.