Blog: Sports Massage at the London Marathon

First year student on the BSc Sport Rehabilitation programme at St Mary’s University, Twickenham Aisha James has written a blog about her experience providing sports massage to charity runners in this year’s London Marathon.

Everyone who volunteered to provide massage services for runners post-event met in the Rehab block on campus at 9am. Here we all signed in and found out what charities we would be working with that day. I was going to be working with Mind. We then loaded our massage equipment onto coaches and set off on the journey from Twickenham into central London. Everyone got dropped off at their charities venues, ours being the last drop off, at the Corinthia Hotel on Whitehall Place. We were set up early so we got to go and explore the area. We were next to the 25 mile mark so could see the elite runners starting to come through and the atmosphere from the crowd waiting was amazing. The first few runners started to come into Mind’s venue at about 1pm and so then the massages commenced. It started off relatively steady with each of us having a break in-between runners. After an hour or so, the main bulk of runners started to come into the venue, the massages then started to get more frequent with no breaks in-between. The charities workers made a register so that there were not a lot of runners waiting in our room at any one time and they were being called through from the food room when it was time for their massage. This made it easier on us as the room wasn’t too full whilst we were trying to massage. By 5pm, there were no more runners to massage and the charity thanked us for our services, saying that the runners were telling them how good they felt after the massages. This paired up with what the runners told us. After every massage, the runners were so grateful for what we were doing, thanking us and saying that they really appreciated it and already their legs were starting to feel a little better. Some others also saying that they had never had the service after an event like that in the past and they could feel the difference. All around it was a great experience and to hear the stories from the runners about how much they raised for the charity and why they were running was inspiring. We got back to campus at around 8pm and after a long day decided to order an Indian for our dinner before heading to bed. I would definitely volunteer at an event like this again in the future and I’m sure everyone else who volunteered would also as it made us feel part of helping such a big event in the UK’s calendar take place.