You've Been Very Knotty!

I went to get a massage yesterday to work out some of the kinks that have been building up over the past few months.  I love how IM training allows for you to "need" massages to help repair and heal your muscles...usually I'm just considered an overindulgent snob, but now it's for the benefit of my Ironman...yeah, right!  I mean it's on my training plan, right there in writing..."massage"...uh, ok, coaches orders, I have to do it!  (I have been wondering what I've been paying him for and now I figured it out...his plans include massage days!)

Well, I planned it perfectly...have the massage at 7:45, slip out of there after an hour and glide right into bed...genius!  Now I can be super relaxed and then just drift right to sleep!  Oh sweet mother of god, that was not the case.  Apparently I drew the psycho masseuse card.  I'm not talking about "oh, could you please lighten the pressure, that's a little tough"...no, she might as well have been using a meat tenderizer on me, hammering it on my back over and over again...I was like ground beef walking out of there.  I knew there was a problem when I was lounging in the quiet area reading up on the parties around town in N Focus magazine (where do these people find time to attend galas and parties...don't they know there's a long bike ride the next morning?) and I see this flash of a person fly by back and forth, hurrying and scurrying along in a very ungraceful fashion.  "Please, please, please don't let that lummox be assigned to me, please!"...card's up...she's mine!  The girl had me grimacing within the first three seconds and I think I was even more tense, fearing what she was going to do, than when I had walked in there.  She found muscles I didn't even knew existed and preyed on the ones that had been overly abused at swim practice that morning after about 1200 yards of pulling.  "Make the madness stop, please...why didn't I sign up for 30 minutes?...an hour!?!  HELP! "  Even the parts that you expect to be gentle, you know toes, head, face, were an all out beating...not ease or grace about it...I was being pummeled.  Even though I was in a constant state of fear and panic for the entire hour, I walked out of there really loose and actually felt great.  I did go home and try to see if I had bruises on my back...probably resembling a dog who hears himself fart, looking around and around at my back trying to see something.   

Alas, all the benefits were lost less than 24 hours later at swim practice when Ashley had us do 15x200, with a 600 warm up and 400 cool down...4,000...yep, my back's all jacked up again!