KARMA IS A 5K

Running has allowed me to make many dreams come true. Take the one where I'm in the bathroom and I miss the starting horn and have to chase every single person:  I can now cut it off the ambitions list and paste  onto the realities list. Having woken up with a cold, I knew I'd have to either take it easy or work thrice as hard as everyone else. Well! Make that 6 times as hard!

Despite having arrived one hour before the start of the race, I spent the first mile and a half hauling major tail just to pass, well, the bbbb...the bbbACK-OF-THE-PACKERS!

In the end, I added three minutes to my average time, four minutes off my PR and weeks of embarrassment to my calendar! All I could think of was:  a.) my husband saying to himself, "ha! wanna nag me about wet towels on the floor? let's see if you can nag your way past EVERYONE! and b.) the doctor I saw last week, after falling/hitting my head, telling me as he held my face in his hands, "NO. RUNNING. OUTSIDE. FOR TWO WEEKS."

Coincidence? Well then, coincidence is a bitch. Karma is a 5K. And I will see them both at the next rang...with quadruple-laced tennies!

INCONTINANCE

Tackling tough subjects, it’s what I do. So in that spirit I shall let the reader in on something the magazines are not spelling out. As a road racer, we have access to information on how to reach our lactic acid thresholds (please see another book for what the hell that means), activating our fast twitch muscle fibers, troubleshooting sciatica and plantars ficisitis, improving gait, and shaving minutes off a 10K, to name a few. I even know how to put little round bandages on my nipples to prevent chafing (not my nip…it’s if you’re a guy – I don’t …nevermind). What I want to know is how not to, well, go on myself. I know, many of you are thinking, “Yeah! Now, that’s my resolution! Better bowels in the new year!” Here’s how I tried to deal: I figure, all the best runners have mantras, affirmations they say in their minds when they face fear, fatigue, hit the wall or other adversity on the course. I got myself one of those mantras. Now whenever I am yards away from a portable or, if I’m hallucinating and see a proper bathroom in front of me, I just repeat, in a very sure, confident, voice-inside my head, over and over until I almost believe it, “Not a shitter”. I close my eyes and keep repeating, “Winners never shit and shitters never win”, “Winners never shit and shitters never win”. I should tell you that doesn’t work. I found that when I’m busy drilling thoughts into my head, especially lies, I can’t place my focus on squeezing the cheeks shut, which (all in favor?) is where my mind needs to be.

I came too close to call (and as it would have it, too far from a john) during a trip to Salem, Mass last summer. I was leaving a beachfront park, a spot recommended to me by a non-runner, the kind that takes twelve times around to equal a mile. Feeling like a caged mouse, I set out to pound the avenue and rather than try to remember mantras, actually fighting to keep them out of my head. I couldn’t get away from “The problem’s not your gait, it’s something that you ate!” I battled between my conscience, which relented, “Sausage and peppers? That’s not fuel, now you’ll crap your shorts, you fool!” Then my mind started racing with things that didn’t rhyme, like “There’s a first time for everything”. I debated whether to walk (usually I don’t take breaks and have something to prove, but not today!) in case it calmed things down, or to run which shakes things up more but at least affords you quicker arrival at your destination. I even went over what I could say to the people who were putting me up had I bumped into them – I would tell them I had to pee really badly. When you say you have to pee people don’t think you’re grotesque, merely human. Peeing is a fact of life. Tell someone you have to poo really bad, and they look at you like, “Who does that?”

At the risk of having you, the reader, suspecting I’m weird for discussing bodily comings and goings, I have chosen to finish the incontinence discussion and dive right into the flatulence discussion with no bathroom breaks. I’d rather be thought of as someone who goes on and on about it than the person who brought it up later once you’d forgotten about it.

Pointing fingers at childbirth, age and other potential culprits for why I fart, I have found, is a waste of time. I needed to get at the when, the where if I am to prevent, if not mask this problem. I’ve realized that, say, being in the right place at the right time, inopportune moments present themselves constantly, you just have to show up.

Take sitting. If you do it for a long period of time, try to stand up and lift a two-year-old above your head at a birthday party in front of family, you’re going to pass gas. But let’s apply this to running. In our sport, we have what’s called the talk test. One main tenet of this measure is that it allows the runner to assess whether they’re going faster than their ideal heart rate. This can be done by talking to your training partner or yourself if you’re wacked. If you can’t maintain a comfortable conversation, the prevailing wisdom is that you’re going too fast. I never understood this since I thought running wasn’t supposed to be comfortable, otherwise it would be called jogging, but what do I know? I believe flatulence is an underrepresented issue that is not addressed in any of the go-to publications. Think of me as the one who wants to put a face on farts. Now I am self-trained so I run alone. But I still have people in front of me and in back of me, and I wanted to see if they could hear my sounds, if you will, so I devised the fart test. It differs from the talk test in that the talk test involves absolutely no coughing whatsoever. It’s faster and easier when participants follow these steps:

1. Switch music player to “off” position, if applicable.

2. Just before each episode, cough in time

I concluded that if I could remember to cough, I could continue to fart with no interruptions to my training. It’s the same with the pee/poo (paradox). If people think you cough a lot, it’s a fact of life, right, whereas farting a lot? Who does that? Certainly, not me. Prove it. Now if I could cough flatulance’s much more evil and unforgiving stepsister, incontinence, away, I could train even harder. Though I’m not too quick to chalk my sprints to the potty up to junk miles – some of my most explosive (make no mistake: all of my puns are intended) legwork was done not en route to a finish line but to the john.

TRIGGERS

Mind you, I’m not a jogger – unless I’m going over 7 miles, I push the pace, people. You might imagine my discontent, then at the very slightly-built young lady holding a mobile phone and her convenience store Big Slurp in one hand, and her 3 percent body fat slash massive shoulders slash “Just say my trigger word and I’ll turn on you, and you, and even you, Comrade” –type dog in the other. All I can say is that I think I understand the phenomenon of the “runner’s high” I’ve read so much about but not experienced first-hand. It was quite the rush to see her get dragged through the air like a kite in March. She may have been dumbfounded as to why she should be chasing her dog that was chasing me. I, on the other hand, thought this was right in keeping with the dog owner I love to hate: that she didn’t drop her phone, she didn’t dribble one bit of drink from the time her animal sprung after me tells me she underestimated her dog and gave her juggling abilities more credit than they deserved. If something had gone down between that pit bull and me? Please! She deserved it! Consider it your wake-up call, girly. Oh, and God? Thank you. I take it you heard my pleas over the barking. And I don’t really think humans are superior to animals or anything. Well, maybe with the exception of squirrels. They are spiteful. That’s not just my opinion, either. Ask anyone.

DOGGED

On the way back from a three-miler near my house a very cute dog with a very dumb owner started (what do you call it? When they’re excited so they only take small bites?) “engaging” my ankles. I thought, “Wow, this guy really loves his dog and all he wants is for me to love him, too”. I remember thinking there was something so sweet and infuriatingly negligent about that. In this, a similar pickle just on a different day, I decided to shoot him a look – the kind that he could interpret however he wanted, and of course, that he could not prove in any courtroom. He called out from behind a car he thought he’d just the same proceed to fix, “He just wants to play”. I thought of all the young children that might be about and bit down on my tongue until all that I could manage from the slit between my lips was “I don’t”.