With my legs a bit stiff from track, this morning I went to the dry land swim workout. Since there were only three of us in attendance today, Teresa decided to bring the pain moreso than usual and forced me to do an unholy amount of squats and lunges. (I got the last laugh though, sweating all over every square foot of the workout area. Have fun mopping up my Asian funk, Teresa!)

What did T-Pain schedule after dry land? A 90 minute bike ride that included 5 three minute hill repeats. I dejectedly did my warmup on the trainer, then busted the bike free and rode to a hill that’s a mile from our house (the first ride of the season — had to dust off the cobwebs a bit) and proceeded to turn my quads into this:

(The shape of the legs is pretty accurate — I’ve been cursed with SALS, or Stumpy Asian Leg Syndrome. Thanks, Mom.)

With a run and a swim tomorrow, a stair workout and swim class Saturday, and a 3 1/2 hour ride + brick run Sunday, I think by Monday my leg muscles should make for a pretty tasty pulled pork sandwich. Mmmm, painful.

Oh carbs, how I love thee.

I was all gung-ho until the holidays hit, at which point I gained back what I had lost and chubbed up to my fattest weight ever. It was pretty depressing – I wouldn’t call myself “fat,” but I was definitely at my flabbiest. I checked back in with my strength trainer, who agreed that I looked a bit “chunkier” (sigh) and told me to start writing down my food again. He also bullied me into sharing my weight every week, so instead of my vague “I’m down a pound,” I’d have to start giving actual numbers. Crap.

This week I turned in my food log and was told I had made a marked improvement in the slop I was shoving down my gullet. I’ve so far lost about 6 lbs but have a ways to go to hit my goal weight. I’m basically going for “skinniest I’ve been since I got my tonsils removed when I was sixteen” weight, only with more muscle mass and fewer popsicles. (It was the “subsist off popsicles and tea” diet, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t poop for a week. Damn was I skinny though!)

Breakfast of champions

The one thing that threw me for a loop was when I got my body composition tested. To me the fat percentage seemed inaccurate – it was about 4% higher than I expected and placed me in the “poor” category. Normally I wouldn’t think much of it, but I don’t look that fat, for crying out loud, and I do stay pretty active even if I do tend to eat utter garbage. Also, bear with me here as I introduce an example derived from VH1 of all places. I caught part of an episode of Celebrity Fit Club on TV this week, and one of the “celebrities” getting weighed in looked considerably chunkier than me but apparently had 2% less body fat. Granted, she was about 3 inches shorter than I am, but still. She was told that if she lost 20 lbs, her body fat would drop about 4% (I forget the exact number), yet my strength trainer told me that if I lost 20 lbs to hit my goal weight, I’d drop 10% of my body fat. That seems like a pretty big difference for two people with apparently similar body compositions and weight goals.

This whole body composition nonsense kind of confuses me. Either way, I know what I want my goal weight and my body fat percentage to be, so I guess it doesn’t matter too much what the test says I’m currently at. All I know is that racing should be a bit easier when I’m hauling 20-25 fewer pounds through the water, on the bike and while I’m running. I’d also like my Ironman Canada finish photo to look pretty hardcore and not “Hey, that fat kid is blocking the finish line!”, at which point I’d start sobbing and trying to unwrap my finisher’s medal thinking there’s chocolate inside.

I don’t even like chocolate that much, but I’d still chow this down

This – costume + stiffer back = pretty much what I looked like

We got to the hotel and I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. To my horror, I was unnaturally shifted to the left like I was rockin’ a permanent gangsta lean. At this point, I was crabby as hell and just wanted to lie down, so I spent most of the afternoon on the floor staring at the carpet and wondering how clean it actually was. To make matters worse, Jason had come down with a cold so he was feeling as miserable as I was. The Gimp and The Germ made for quite the glamorous couple last week.

After some sad stretching attempts and a couple of Icy Hot patches, I pretty much gave up and resorted to hobbling around Vegas with jumbo shrimp posture all week.

I ran into a colleague of mine who’s an Internet marketer-slash-chiropractor, and he gave me a little TLC which helped a lot. Some of his exclamations included, “Jesus, your left IT band is so stiff,” “You’ve got muscular legs!” (always what a girl wants to hear), and “Why is your neck so STIFF?” Come to think of it, every other remark out of his mouth had to do with how stiff my body was. I think I come in just under “walking cadaver” on the Scientific Chart of Stiffness.

I wasn’t my usual chummy self in Vegas because of how unhealthy and uncomfortable I felt all week. We’re back home now — Jason is still sick and miserable and my back and neck are still kind of aggravating me. I’ve been married to the foam roller all weekend long and have scheduled a long-ass massage (as opposed to a long ass-massage) for tomorrow and plan on stalking my chiropractor all week so he can hopefully pretzel my body into something resembling a normal human form again. I just want to feel healthy again so I can continue building a solid base going into next season. Grrr, arghh….

Eli is a bit more subtle in his breathing critique. I’ll be mid-lift and he’ll suddenly go, “You’re engaging your core, right?”, at which point I flex my abs in a knee-jerk reaction and respond with, “Uh, yeahhhhh…” Everything requires an “engaged core,” even writing a check for the day’s workout session (okay, maybe not). After our last meeting my abs were sore despite not having done any crunches or ab work — they were all hurty by proxy.

Regular, lazy Becca breathing is different than workout breathing. Lazy Becca Breathing is quiet, calm and satisfying. Workout Breathing is loud, shallow, “I’m gonna pop out a baby because I’m in labor and this is how I learned to breathe in Lamaze” breathing. I hate Workout Breathing. Why can’t my belly loll up and down like a distended Somalian’s when I’m exercising? Stupid core being all important and whatnot!

All I’m saying is that this fancypants new breathing better get me a sick-ass looking stomach, because if it doesn’t then I’m gonna call shenanigans on this “having to think about how to breathe” nonsense and will start gulping in air like a greedy chunkster again…

My bangs were uber-oily and stuck out like Alfalfa. I didn’t have any clips or pins so I resorted to wearing a winter hat all day. Nice fashion statement, I know.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of There’s Something About Mary gross out humor, I couldn’t help but think during this massage how the room felt perfectly suited for a, uh, “self-pleasuring” chamber. Seriously, it’s a dark, windowless room with soothing music and a box of Kleenex and a giant bottle of lube sitting on the table. (And after you’re done you leave the room feeling greasy but less tense.) Ewwwwww.

Let’s move on, shall we? My massage therapist this time around was a spiky haired Asian dude named Troy. His hands were more brutal than Ana Lucia’s, which I liked, but he also felt the need to massage my face, which was weird. He also gave me a really awkward finger massage, intertwining our hands like we were re-enacting scenes from Jungle Fever. What the hell is the point of a finger massage other than to make the massagee (is that a word?) feel super awkward? If that’s the objective, then mission accomplished, Troy.

After the massage was finished, Troy soothingly told me that I could take as much time as I needed and left the room. I took this “quiet reflection time” as an opportunity to spend several minutes blowing out all of the snot that had accumulated in my cranial cavity during the forty some odd minutes I spent laying face-down on a table. Gravity is a jerk-faced bastard. (So are colds.)

I left the facility and went to work, and then went straight from work to my chiropractic appointment. I shamefully told my chiropractor that the reason I was so greased up was because I had gotten a massage and that, contrary to what he may suspect, I actually practice good hygienic habits. His response: “Sure, whatever.” Sigh. The Becca-shaped grease mark I left on his table probably didn’t help my cause.

Overall, aside from feeling physically filthy and 125% more snotty afterwards, Massage #2 felt pretty successful. My back still feels a little tender but hopefully the muscles will learn to behave themselves and act less ridiculously stiff. We’ll see how #3 goes!

Massage #1 was given to me by my triathlete coach’s massage therapist, Richard. She referred me to him after I was complaining of pain near my right shoulder blade. He’s a pleasant, calm Asian man who works out of his house. I spent an hour laying face-down listening to Jack Johnson while Richard worked on my shoulder (at one point, he took what felt like a running start and leaned all of his body weight onto my back, which I found pretty amusing). I liked Richard a lot but found him to be a bit out of my price range for regular visits.

Massage #2 was courtesy of a no-nonsense woman I tried out for a session. Her hands were brutally magical (I’m a fan of deep, hard massages to the point of being unbearable — the harder, the better) but she talked non-stop and complained about how expensive it is to travel nowadays. I don’t particularly care to have conversations with surly masseuses, so I ruled her out for subsequent visits.

Massage #3 was in Cancun, Mexico, after the Ironman Cancun 70.3 (I’ll write a separate post about that race soon). Jason and I booked a couple’s massage at our resort, and two Mexican masseuses poked and prodded at us for what was probably ninety minutes but seemed like an eternity. The whole ordeal was uncomfortable for both of us. Jason was uneasy because it was his first ever massage, and he was paranoid about virtually everything the woman did. When she rubbed some aromatic cream on her hands and stuck them under his nose, instructing him to “Breathe deep,” he wondered if he was going to get knocked out and wake up in a bathtub full of ice with a kidney missing. Also, he put up a stink about having to get nekkid. I, meanwhile, had the pleasure of my masseuse giving me a long, grueling massage all over my horribly sunburned back (that deserves its own post as well), which felt more like I was being viciously tenderized for a lavish cannibal buffet.

I don’t particularly like getting massages, but since my doctors urged me to consider them for health purposes I booked an appointment with a massage therapy facility for Attempt #4. The massage was good timing since my back and neck had been bothering me recently and I had been having frustrating workouts. It also doesn’t help that I get paid to hunch in front of a computer all day. The fact that I don’t have a Quasimodo hump yet is astounding.

Anyway, I booked a massage at a new place in Capitol Hill. After filling out a rough approximation of my medical history, I met with a woman who looked vaguely like tailie Ana Lucia from Lost but wasn’t quite as surly scowly (sorry, Michelle Rodriguez). She was refreshingly non-hippie and kept pretty quiet for the entire hour, save for the occasional stomach gurgle (I bet she hadn’t eaten dinner yet). The massage was ok — I wish she would have abused me more, but she did do this one maneuver I dubbed the “attempt to rip my arm off at the shoulder blade,” and that felt pretty satisfying.

Since I don’t find massages relaxing, my mind couldn’t help but randomly wander for sixty minutes. Here’s a snippet of thoughts:

• After noticing one of those flashing fire alarm lights directly above me on the ceiling, I suppressed a giggle at the thought of it going off, forcing a dozen naked massage patients to come running out of the building.
• If I had to attribute the music to a particular movie score, I’d say it vacillated between crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Desperado, and any stupid scene where a couple runs at each other in slow motion (most likely in a field).
• Every time the massage therapist yanked my arm up or adjusted something, I worriedly wondered if my boob was exposed.
• I thought of how hilarious it’d be if, while the therapist was working on my neck, my head spontaneously fell off and landed on her feet.
• When I was instructed to flip over, I stared at the therapist’s nondescript shoes and felt disappointed. She should really mix things up a bit and wear clown shoes or flippers as a joke (you know, to lighten the mood — she is kneading the skin of a naked person, after all).

Thus concluded my first massage in about four months. I’ll try to start getting them more regularly (doctors suggested once a month and, unsurprisingly, the massage therapist recommended once every couple weeks), since there’s nothing more relaxing than dropping trou and allowing a complete stranger to mildly molest you for an hour. (And you’ve got to tip them afterward. That’s pretty messed up.)