Exquisite agony

I'm strange.

I emerged from my massage last night, tired and bruised, after a very intense session concentrating on just one area of one leg. I loved it!

There's a type of pain associated with the massage of muscles in a certain condition, that is quite delicious. It's a pain you instinctively know is doing you good. It doesn't always happen with massage: sometimes it's just ouch-painful, but once in a while a muscle gets in a state, the unknotting of which is absolute ecstasy.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not the sort of person who sticks pins in myself for fun. Sometimes massage can be absolute hell. When tight muscles are sore to touch, then it's usually agony having them massaged. My hamstrings and ITB are such examples. Tracy pushes her thumbs of steel into my upper legs and the pain is so intense a sort of coping mechanism kicks in: I laugh! Yes, I laugh. This is nothing to do with enjoyment though. I suppose you have to laugh or you'll cry.

See, I told you: I'm strange.

There is a different sort of tightness though which just feels so good when treated. I get this sometimes when my piriformis muscle (deep in the buttock) gets tight and I start to get back ache. I massage it by lying on a tennis ball and writhing around, rolling the ball back and forth over the tight spot. The pain is a sort of warm deep aching: images of melted chocolate rather than cold steel. I writhe around in a pained ecstasy. I do this in private, you understand!

I've suffered with phantom pains on the inside of my calf for over a month now. At first these were 'treated' by massaging the calf, but apparently to no avail. Aside from the rather disconcerting knife stab pains, I realised by the tingly and vague nature of the day-to-day pains that they were likely caused by a trapped nerve, but where? I have slowly come to the realisation that it's a tight shin muscle (tibialis anterior) causing the problem, but due to various circumstances I haven't been able to get anyone to massage the shin, until the session last night back with my regular massage therapist Tracy. I guess the shin doesn't usually need much attention in a runner, so maybe I should forgive Tracy's colleagues for ignoring my requests to treat it.

So last night I discovered that the tibialis anterior and the adjacent lateral edge of the soleus have the same property as the piriformis. I think poor Tracy was getting a tad embarrassed at my exclaiming "Oh yes!" with regularity. It wasn't all guilty pleasure though, as Tracy had to get in deep against a nerve, and I got a sensation akin to someone cooking popcorn on the top of my foot, but it certainly was a massage unlike any other.

45 minutes of delicious pain to get rid of weeks of horrible phantom pain. I hope it worked!