Or, as Sir Mix-a-lot would say, “My chir-o-prac-tor don’t want none unless he cracks bones, hon!” And to Nathan, my Magnolia Seattle chiropractor, I’m probably the Mack Daddy or Swass of patients. You see, I visit a chiropractor and a physical therapist for various maladies, and both of them have pretty harsh things to say about my neck and back. In their words, working on my back is like “pressing down on concrete.” While a healthy back, muscles and joints should have a bit of spongy give to them, my back is as hard as Sharon Stone’s face in Catwoman (I apologize for the terrible movie reference). Both the chiro and the PT recommended I get massage therapy at least once a month to help loosen my tight muscles. I’ve previously gotten three massages in my life. Here’s a brief drill down of each one: 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...

One of my greatest triathlon weaknesses (aside from running and biking, of course) is swimming. I don’t like swimming. I feel like my stamina in the water sucks, I drag my arm too much, my turnover is too slow, I’m either too hot or too cold, my wet suit is ghetto and ill-fitting, and I find swim training boring and craptacular. My disdain for swimming has reflected in my swim times: every race except for one has resulted in disappointment. I want to improve a lot in 2009, and I figured that a huge area of opportunity would be improving my swim. I think I can shave anywhere from 5-15 minutes off my worst half Ironman swim time, depending on how much I train. So I cued up the training montage music and signed up for a dry land swim conditioning class that would help strengthen my body and improve my swim stroke, technique, and stamina. Teresa teaches the swim conditioning class, and for good reason. She swam for the University of Nevada-Reno and is one fast mofo. My triathlon trainer is often the first female out of the water during races, and she was the fastest female swimmer in her age division at the Kona World Championships. She is pretty much twice as fast as me in the water. It’s depressing. I remember that for my first open water swim she gave me like a 5 minute head start before swimming after me, and she and I got to the buoy at the same time. Sigh. Anyway, I signed up for an hour of interval bike training and then did the swim conditioning class immediately afterwards. I’m not that hungry in the mornings so all I had to eat before working out was 3/4 of a Kashi Go Lean bar and some water. By the end of my dual workout I was ready to devour a mid-size farm animal. Betsy was my swim conditioning buddy that morning. We started by squatting down and chucking a huge weighted ball back and forth to each other, then we did about 40 triceps dips. After more ball passes and a second set of dips I was already feeling the dreaded jell-o arm effect…and we were only about 10 minutes into the workout. Oh God, I was in trouble. Let me pause and show you roughly what my triceps look like: I have the arm strength of a feeble cartoon octogenarian, and every exercise during this class was exploiting them with sadistic, unrelenting glee. Teresa made me get on the Vasa trainer, where I repeatedly failed to properly pull my arms back in the “catch” position. My wimpy arms were quivering under the teeny amount of weight Teresa had given me. After I half-assed about 20 reps, I switched with Betsy and dejectedly watched her adjust the tension and hammer out a ton of swim strokes with perfect form. I wish I had Betsy’s triceps. But I don’t. I have Mr. Burns-esque triceps. After 45 minutes of non-stop triceps abuse, I headed home to shower and get ready for work. I knew I’d be in trouble when I could already feel the soreness of my arms a couple hours after the class ended. Sure enough, the next day I felt like Ralphie’s brother from A Christmas Story, only instead of not being able to put my arms down, I couldn’t raise them more than halfway. I was rockin’ John McCain arms the entire weekend. Showering was hell, pulling my hair back was hell, rolling on deodorant was hell, changing shirts was hell. Jason quickly got tired of hearing my agonized shrieks whenever...