Who Is Tougher? Big Bruisers or Delicate Dynamos

Lots of massage therapists enjoy working with athletes so much they make a specialty of it, which is to say they look for people whose routine is extreme. I’m not one of those people, though I have to admit when I get one pro hockey player on my schedule, it naturally tends to fill up with a few more players referred by their friends.

I found myself actually watching games as this happened, largely because I was trying to match up the mayhem I ran into on the table with the events that created them.

Hockey apparently is exciting to watch, but this was lost on me. I couldn’t see the tiny object of the game as it whipped by, and I watched in horror as people dressed in what looked like fat suits charged at each other at 50 miles per hour. The saving grace of this game, it appeared, is that people collided on ice, keeping the momentum going instead of stopping into the corpus delecti.

“Hockey guys are the toughest people in the world,” I thought as I watched what would later end up on my table as separated shoulders, massive bone bruises and protracted hamstrings.

Then she came in.

Swan Lake was playing down the street at the big theater and this lady was one of the swans. All 94 pounds of her.

“I am so sore,” she said. “And I have two shows tomorrow.”

She was, of course, hyper mobile, but she had spots of neck and lumbar tension that reminded me of steel-bound cables, like the ones that hold up the Golden Gate Bridge. Then I saw the bruises. Huge, purple, gold, yellow and green, going up each leg and one the serratusi.

“How did this happen?” I asked, thinking this was from some violent encounter.

“Well, when the guys catch you in the air, if they don’t catch you right, they just grab hard,” she said. “They try to do it right, but if they don’t, they can’t just drop you. We have to make it look like everything is perfect.”

Wow. Dancers, especially ballerinas, have to make it look good even when it isn’t. At least the hockey guys get to grunt and scream and even get an icepack before going back to the game. There are no corner guys in Swan Lake.

“Ballerinas are the toughest people in the world,” I concluded.