Pacific Grove Triathlon Enjoys NHI Sports Team Volunteers

Huge thanks to National Holistic Institute Group #30 Senior and NHI Sports Team member Bar Houston for contributing this story…

Pacific Grove Triathlon was another great success! Thanks to NHI teacher Conrad Santos and the nine NHI massage therapists that made the drive to Pacific Grove.

The massage tables and chair arrived in the fog about 6:15am in time to find a decent parking place, but not in time to get into the vendor area. With the help of some high school volunteers and Group 31 MTs, we managed to get 8 tables, 1 massage chair and all the supplies the quarter mile down to our two pop-up tents. Kate and Lynn were our contacts at the event and were very helpful in arranging for a table and access to the Hospitality Tent for breakfast. By 8:00am everyone had arrived, event T-shirts were passed out, and we reviewed the do’s and don’ts for post-event massage. The radio was in place and Anastacio had a perfect radio station setting the pace and we were off to breakfast.

The group gathered again at 9:00am when Conrad put us through some personal warm up moves and a little Thai Chi. After some body work on each other, we opened at 9:30am with a shoulder strain (one of the athletes fell over a guard rail, she had iced it but still wanted to compete). We were off to a slow start, but by 10:30am Conrad was supervising the sign-up list, the tip jar was starting to look healthy and we had lots of smiles starting to move off our tables. The chair was set up at the hospitality tent for staff and we managed 17 chair massages while 112 athletes signed up on the tables.

The fog thinned out but we never saw the sun all day. There was a bit of a breeze on most of our tables with shivering clients early on. It warmed up and turned out to be a damp, but good day.

We logged in our last client at 2:45 and tore down and cleaned up with the tables in the van by 3:30. Again, thanks to everyone for the good work. I did not get to thank Kate and Lynn at the end, but made sure they knew we appreciated their help several times through out the day.