Jumbo Shrimp: Good as Food, Bad as Posture

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.)

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….