Spa Season

The spring and summer 2009 have officially been declared “Spa Season”. From the West to the East, inches of rain have soaked the ground days upon weeks at a time, leaving the trails filled with a mix of sloppy goo.

During a recent event, I mashed the pedals navigating through the stewy sludge, and as gobs of mud splashed into my eyes, up my nose and covered my shorts, I pondered the advantages of being a mountain biking girl.

Women, and I realize I’m making a huge generalization here, love to be pampered. Go to any spa and you’ll see mud treatments because your skin’s too rough, seaweed treatments because you’re too fat, sugar treatments because you’re, oh, I don’t know, too sour from a mundane daily routine of driving the kids to hell and beyond for soccer practice, preparing a “home-nuked” sodium-laden pile of pseudo food from a bag for a bunch of gobbling ingrates, then collapsing on the sofa to be screamed at by any number of talking heads on TV who insist that you must know what they’re telling you, lest you be left out of the water cooler chatter at your job, which you hate. Then you get to do it all over again the next day! A girl really needs a break, and what better way to do that then have someone else cover you with mud, salt, and seaweed then hose it all off of you in “Shawshank Redemption” fashion.

This person looks positively miserable.

Well, I have already spent most of the season covered in mud. And no one has needed to back me up into a stall and spray me down. There has been plenty of rain to do that for me. The mud from the trail has left my legs smoother than ever, (mind you, I never said bruise or scratch-free) the bags under my eyes are nearly gone from all of the grinning and my teeth are glistening white! I get at least two very intense treatments a week, for free!

Exercise, exfoliation, aromatherapy, and teeth whitening treatments, along with communing with nature. What could be a more perfect way to wash away the stresses of life?

I’m planning on another treatment yet tonight and according to the weather it looks like I’ll be getting the deep cleaning session with a slight chance of electro-stim. In fact, I think I hear the “gongs of tranquility” rumbling overhead. Ahhhhhhh!