Hey--this is something I wrote 3 years ago. I'm posting it here as an intro to one of our new sponsors: Xtreme Cryo.
(Look up Dr. Bill Higgenbotham on Facebook and you can see what I'm talking about here.)
Here's what happens: You stand inside a chamber with your head sticking out the top. Then instead of heat or hot steam, you get COLD steam, a product of liquid nitrogen. Negative 252 degrees F. worth of cold. Your body does what it's designed to do, pulling blood to your core and allowing your extremities to get very cold. Inflammation in your legs goes away. Blood circulating closer to your heart and lungs gets oxygenated faster because it doesn't go to your hands and feet as fast. The whole process takes only 3 minutes, but when I got out, my legs felt noticeably better!
"You got another ten minutes?" Bill asked me. My flight wasn't for a couple hours, so what the heck. He took me in the other room and put some legging things on me (kinda like having a blood pressure cuff running from your toes to your thighs) as I sat in a massage chair. As air pumped into and out of the sleeves around my legs, the chair massaged my back.
"Let me show you a few more things," and he proceeded to work on stretches and using some thick rubber tape straps that he wraps around and around my leg, squeezing out the blood, then stretching and working those muscles, then unwrapping them rapidly, allowing warm blood back in.
OK, I know I'm a fairly slow marathoner, so maybe everybody went home already, but I was trying to figure out why everyone who had run the Zydeco Marathon wasn't in Bill's office right then. It was an awesome experience.
I walked out of Bill Higginbotham's Rapid Recovery Center feeling like I hadn't even run a marathon that day. I don't think I could have been any more recovered it I had gone to an upholstery shop.
So I'm trying to figure out how to get someone to bring a cryosauna to Grand Rapids. Or maybe someone has one already? Anyway, it's a kick-ass post-marathon thing.
