Mmmmmm…. massages

This has been a week of recovery and preparation. After last week’s challenges:

• 14 miles of running on Thursday
• 50 miles of cycling on Friday
• an early start and a day of enthusiastic cheering and spectating at the London triathlon on Saturday
• Victory 5 mile race on Sunday
• Run Leading on Monday
• A freezing lake swim on Tuesday

I decided that I needed to look after myself, so on Tuesday evening, I booked myself in for a well-earned massage with Renee.

Renee is currently training to be a masseur, so the massage was beneficial for both of us. She got a chance to hone her (already excellent) skills, and I got to enjoy having my aching legs rubbed and soothed for 90 minutes for free. After everything I’ve done recently, my legs were very tight, so the massage was quite firm at times, but I appreciate the results. It was the first time I met Renee, but I would thoroughly recommend her. She was professional and polite, but also very friendly. I enjoyed being able to chat to her about sports, as she’s also a runner and triathlete.

I’m not always as organised as I’d like to be, so yesterday I had a fantastic sports massage (which I’d forgotten I’d booked) with the brilliant Pete at YOU Massage Therapy. I’ve been seeing Pete for quite some time now, and I usually book to see him after I’ve had a big race. I think I’d planned to see him, so that I’d be as well prepared as possible for the New Forest Marathon… but my preparation hasn’t really gone as well as I’d hoped, so I’m not sure a massage is enough to help now.

I asked Pete to work on my shoulders as I’m conscious that I spend a lot of time hunched over a computer, and I’ve always had very tense shoulders. I also found that my shoulders were aching during Friday’s ride. OMG – my shoulders were far tighter than I thought. This image illustrates perfectly how they felt:

Fortunately, my legs didn’t feel too bad, so not having as much time spent on them as usual was OK.

I’ve also got a recovery massage booked in with Renee on Friday, in the hope that my legs have some energy left in them for my first ever triathlon… and then I’ve booked a massage with Pete ahead of Ferndown triathlon.

Do you have sports massages? How often? How long before/after a race do you have them?

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