Last week I spent five (ugh) days in Las Vegas for work. There’s a conference that rolls around every late fall that dumps me in Sin City just long enough for me to not want to return until the stale stench of cigarettes, perfume and gamblin’ stank finally dissipates from my clothes and suitcase. (Unfortunately, I’m heading back to Vegas in December for the Rock ‘n Roll Marathon and AGAIN in January for another conference. Kill me.) I didn’t even bother packing workout gear because I knew I was going to be obscenely busy all week and wouldn’t be able to squeeze in a run (and I figured the casino hotel would charge so much for gym access that I could conceivably purchase my own 24 Hour Fitness franchise). I had been working out fairly steadily the weeks leading to the conference, so I figured my health would be pretty good going into the event. Naturally, I was wrong. Okay, so I’ve posted in the past about how un-humanly stiff my back is. I’ve got bad genes, I work in front of a computer all day, I slouch too much, blah blah blah, you know the drill. Anyway, on Monday morning I woke up with a ridiculously stiff back. I creaked around like the Tin Man trying to get packed for my trip, and I managed to squeeze in about 30 seconds of sad foam rollin’ before Jason shooed me out the door to catch our flight. (I paid him back by being the worst traveling companion in recent history, ginap ginapping at him in the terminal and fidgeting every single minute of our flight like Ralphie in the pink bunny costume.) 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,...

I started doing Pilates (I know, I know) once a week and strength training once a week (throw in dry land and I’ve got 3 days of muscle flexin’ each week) for a pretty important reason (which I’ll get to in my next post, so stay tuned), and both my Pilates instructor and my strength trainer, Eli, keep barking the same order at me: “Remember to breathe. No, engage your core. No, your core.” Apparently, once you get serious about strength training and trying to be healthy, you have to learn how to breathe in a manner different than you have been accustomed to for the past 26 years. Who knew? Every week I meet with Melissa, she chirps at me for an hour and says “Suck in your tummy. Now inhale going down, exhale coming up…” She then watches me sucking in air like a dying fish for a few repetitions before poking my gut until I yank it in so far that I feel like my pooch is going to stick out through my back. Then she nods as if she’s finally satisfied. We continue doing this the entire hour, her poking at my stomach and me whooshing air in and out of my lungs in a highly insufficient manner until I feel like I’m going to pass out due to lack of sweet, sweet oxygen. Pilates, like swimming, is stupid — I can’t remember to breathe all fancy-like while trying to recall fifteen other things simultaneously! 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...

This week I got my second massage in the past couple months. I signed up for a monthly massage package and realized that I had gotten charged for March but hadn’t booked an appointment to get tenderized for an hour. I called and scheduled a late morning massage and figured I’d head into work after it was complete. Big mistake. A word to the wise for anyone considering getting a massage: don’t book one if you can’t shower afterwards. I had showered before going to bed and felt pretty clean going into the massage, but that changed after one hour and roughly 3 gallons of slippery mystery lotion. Afterwards I felt as greasy and sticky as a New Joisey mafioso, only without the thick gold chain, copious tufts of chest hair and velour sweatsuit. And somehow, my hair ended up looking like this: 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...

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...