Believe it or not I've never had a proper, paid-for - 'remedial' - massage before. With the combination of all my back stuff, and stiff muscles from the bike riding, and the weights.. and even the swimming... and with our manic 500k bike ride looming, I decided it might be worth seeing if a massage really could help with some of the constant stiffness I've been feeling. Yep, hard to believe this 44 year old crock of a body could be protesting just a bit at all I've been expecting it to do, with barely a thankyou or much in the way of any TLC whatsoever, other than some frantic stretches to alleviate the various back aches and twinges that I routinely get.)

The last few days I've woken up feeling really.. creaky. And sore. I'd had the card of someone that had been recommended to me. So I bit the self-indulgence bullet, and took the 9am appointment she offered me for this morning. It turned out she was barely 200m from my house. And she was relatively cheap - as massages go. ($35 for 1 1/2 hours.)

What can I say? The jury is still out on it for the moment. Seems my muscles are so tight, she couldn't do as much (in the one and a half hours) that she might normally do (consequently I'm not experiencing any earth shattering 'oh my god I feel wonderful' epiphany over it. She was working pretty lightly (according to her) yet it pretty much bloody hurt in a lot of places - places that she could feel were tight. (And there were a lot of them!) You know, that feeling when you rub a sore muscle, and you do the ooh.. ah... ohh.. owww... yessss, that bit THERE...yeoowww ... that then subsides a bit (apparently the muscle does relax a bit once you press on that sore bit for several seconds)- until you start massaging again and find it again...

Yes, well, I suppose the last twenty odd years of various kinds and degrees of stress loading are just not going to disappear in 90 minutes. No miracles here.

Aside from that, ironically, lying on my stomach for that long wasn't too kind to my lower back... (though towards the end we stuck a pillow underneath my tummy, and that helped.)

And, boy, I felt pretty woozy when I got up.. and half staggered home (glad she was only round the corner and I didn't have to drive actually!)

And then, (ironically again), the rest of the day I was feeling like I shouldn't be doing anything to 'jeopardise' what good she might have done! (Now that's silly, but somehow this vague nausea (apparently a deep massage gets toxins moving...).. and my general apathy seeing it was the worst day of the month anyway (my official sooking day).. meant that I didn't test myself on anything more strenuous than hanging out some washing. (Bad girl, no bike ride... *grovels to the bike riding coach possibly reading this from KL...*)

Yes, so... Supposedly a massage can help you sleep better. So maybe I'll see whether I feel just bloody fantastic in the morning. I do believe, tonight, that I feel vaguely less uptight, physically. Maybe.

Oh yeah.. and when she started - down on the back of my calves - she says 'oh.. so you have some varicose veins here', and I said 'What? Do I really?'... Like I need more proof that my body is really starting to crack up on me...

Geez, growing old is a bit of a crock, isn't it... And for me to continue on doing what I like doing, maybe there has to now be room for a bit of self indulgence by way of a guilt-free massage every now and then.

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