A Mrs. as Good as a Mile

…make that 4 miles!

After a most impatient week off, I took the calf out on a test run this morning.  The mister and I chose the gentlest run in our arsenal.  It was hardly easy after eating bonbons all week, but eight hours later the calf seems to be holding up.  I’m not celebrating just yet since I hear irrational superstition is the hallmark of all great athletes.  And I’m still quite cautious in my return by not running again until Tuesday.  Tomorrow I’m going back to the friendship circle that is the pool at my gym.  Here’s hoping that the janitorial staff will have cleaned up the bloody bandaid floating in the deep end by tomorrow morning.

Swim Membership

The thing about running is, except when you’re packed in with other racers at a start line, it’s not really an activity that puts you in close contact with other people.  Since I’ve been on my little running hiatus, I’ve been spending more time at the pool.  On the worst days it can be a literal stew of human beings, and as to be expected from a lower-end gym, it’s usually filled with the wrong kind of people.

Even when I’m able to run, I try to swim at least once a week.  I’ve been to this pool enough to know the regulars.  There are a scant few who I don’t mind.  Ironically, the best of them all is a guy I call Hitler ‘Stache, and it’s not because of his big cow eyes.  Other than questionable facial hair and a propensity to stay in the pool too long while others are waiting, I like him because he is friendly but reserved, mostly keeps to his side of the lane, and doesn’t suffer fools who don’t follow common sense pool etiquette.  I fancy myself to be of his ilk, but miscreants tend to be more affected by his fascist glare than by my five-foot tall girl pout.  Even in a speedo, nobody messes with Hitler ‘Stache.

Then there are the others, here listed in descending order of offensiveness.

There’s the slow-going pregnant woman, a medical marvel who’s seemingly managed to be in her third trimester for almost two years.

There’s the gregarious Texan, a massive man who loves to talk about how he’s rehabbing a broken bone with aquatic barre exercises against the wall.  The only thing that appears broken is the drawstring on his swim trunks since I’m routinely treated to six inches of plumber’s crack as I go by.

You’ve got the wannabe free-diver who camps out with a timer at the bottom of the deep end, a whole five feet down.  There’s the man who lap swims for hours in full snorkel gear, never breaking the surface to see if anyone might be waiting to get in.  And of course there has to be the standard old man with unsolicited advice.  Yes, I know the butterfly requires a “kick and a half” per stroke, but thanks for stopping me mid-lap to make sure I’m doing it right.

There’s the old woman in full make-up who walks the shallow half of the lane or uses a kickboard so as not to submerge her head.  In truth, there are probably a few of these old women because some of them wear shoes, sometimes they stink of perfume more than others, and often they change ethnicity, but they all count as the same old woman to me.

Then you have the annoying jock with tribal tattoos who thinks he invented the concept of circling like we’re on a swim team and can’t understand how that won’t work when half the people involved are doing water ballet or the pregnancy crawl.

Then we come to the mail order bride who is always accompanied by a crusty old man with a white ponytail who takes poolside video of her swimming on a handheld camcorder.  It could be some kind of coach/athlete relationship, but the way they interact really makes it seem like he bought her out of a catalog.  She once cornered me in the locker room whilst I was in an uncomfortable state of undress and asked me my name.  Now every time she sees me, she excitedly waves and screams “Hi, [ExposedTanLines]!” for all to hear, thus ruining my illusion that I can remain somewhat anonymous amidst this collection of weirdoes.

But in truth, I know that I, too, am a dunce in this confederacy.  I can only imagine what they think of me, the scowling girl in the red swim cap who impatiently taps her foot until someone vacates a lane, who flares her nostrils at people who hang out at the wall and block her flip turn, who flaunts the “Shower Before Entering” rule because damn it, she knows she’s clean so what’s the point.

The fact is, we are all in this cesspool together.  If I don’t like it, well, there’s always the empty expensive gym down the street.

My Not-So-Golden Calf

I am injured and I’m pretty mad about it.  I’ve built my identity so much around being a runner that I’ve gone so far as to start a blog about it, and yet, I’m not running.  I feel like a fraud.

A has had an intermittent pain in his butt for a while now.  I meant that literally and not as a euphemism for yours truly, although he might think otherwise.  This strange muscle or nerve pain will pop up occasionally during a run, but he thinks it actually started when he was sitting in a seat with inadequate cushioning on a really long flight (here’s looking at you, Virgin Airlines).  I was also on that flight but had no such problems since my ass has plenty of cushion, thank you very much.  Quite frankly, it’s hard for me to sympathize with someone hurt for lack of butt fat, especially since this pain isn’t sidelining him anyway.  Whereas my injury is keeping me from running for a week and I’m afraid I’ll go crazy.

Like any good amateur athlete, of course I self-diagnosed.  Initially I thought it was the back of my right knee, but now I’ve isolated the pain to the top of my calf.  I’ve decided to not run for seven days so that it can heal properly in time for the race I’m doing in three weeks.  I hope that will be all it takes, and I’m trying to figure out what to do for exercise in the meantime.  I feel especially sorry for myself when A goes on fast, long-distance runs without me while I stay at home and empty the litter box.

Certainly my problems aren’t as bad as, say, having to flee to the Turkish border because my homeland is being ravaged by civil war.  I know I’m being a Whiny McAnnoyingpants.

I could use this week as a time of reflection, but who wants to do that?  I’ll see you at the pool!  (Once I’ve taken the litter out.)

Shellfish Bastard

I received the strangest piece of mail yesterday.  It was a check from a hospital that went bankrupt a long time ago.  Evidently, I am being reimbursed for overpayment of an emergency room visit back in 2002.  Since starting this blog, I’ve been thinking about all the weird things that have happened to me while running, but I totally forgot this episode.  So now am I not only sixty dollars richer, a new idea for a post just fell right into my lap.  It made me feel like a winner at the game of life, a sentiment that lasted right up until my cat pooped on the living room floor this morning.

I had eaten dinner with my roommate, N, at a trendy Thai restaurant that evening almost eleven years ago.  Back then I was a Pescetarian but called myself a Vegetarian Who Ate Fish, a distinction that I would self-righteously turn up my nose at these days.  I justified it by saying that fish are stupid creatures that deserved to be eaten, but I guess following that logic I should eat my cat as well.  I have since reformed my thinking, not in small part because of what transpired that night.

I ordered the shrimp pad thai, a dish I’ve probably eaten hundreds of times before.  We lollygagged for a while before she left to go back home while I went to my then boyfriend/now husband’s apartment to go for a late night run.  A and I had been dating for just under six months but we were already running together, although doing so after dinner was pretty unorthodox.

I arrived only semi-digested, but we headed out since it was getting really late.  I, of course, was dragging.  About one mile in, as we were running up a pretty steep incline, I felt a sharp, acidic pain traveling up through my sternum.  I wondered if this was heartburn, something I’ve heard about but never really experienced.  I didn’t say anything because I was already holding us back, so I pushed on up the hill and the sensation went away.

We ran for almost a mile more when I realized I felt really strange.  My hands were hot and my fingertips started swelling.  Soon they started to look like cartoon hands where the tips are drawn a bit fatter than the fingers.  I held them up to A and said, “Look at my hands!” but it was dark and it was late and he couldn’t really see anything.  He encouraged me to keep going.

We ran a few blocks more along a golf course when my lips started to swell.  This has happened a few times when I was a child, and finally it dawned on me that I was having some sort of allergic reaction.  I stopped and told A that I was getting fat lips.  He squinted in the dark.  We walked back toward the more commercial part of the street where the streetlights were brighter.  At this point the swelling moved past my lips and onto my whole head.  It felt like my face was floating away.  When A saw me under the light, he finally realized the situation was pretty bad, probably worse than I thought it was.

I suggested we use a nearby pay phone to call N to pick us up.  In retrospect, I guess we should have called 9-1-1, however I was still cognizant enough to worry about how astronomical an ambulance bill would be.  A made what turned out to be a thirty-dollar collect call to my home.  Unfortunately, N and I were both still relatively new to the city and she couldn't get a clear idea of where we were.  A tried his best to tell her using landmarks like the Kentucky Fried Chicken, but these were those prehistoric days before iPhones and Google maps.

A contemplated running back to his place and driving back to get me, but I don’t think he wanted to leave me alone on the street in the middle of the night.  We found a bench outside a closed restaurant and waited.  At this point I had developed such severe stomach cramping that I was writhing in pain.  In my delirium, I remember thinking, “I don’t mind the face thing so much, I just wish I didn’t have diarrhea!”  I was too dumb to understand that my abdominal pain probably wasn’t really bowel-related.

It felt like we waited forever.  It’s normally a twenty-minute ride when the driver knows where she’s going, but given our bad directions I have no recollection of how long it really took.  Ironically, A remembered days later that there was a fire station a block away.

Finally, N found us.  The first thing out of her mouth when she saw me was, “Oh my god!  Your face is the size of a watermelon!”  I didn't know it was that big.

N floored it to the only hospital we knew of.  They shouldered me into the ER, with N, never shying away from the dramatic, shouting, “Her throat is closing!  Her throat is closing!  She’s dying!”

I don’t really know if my throat was actually closing, but I have never had a shorter wait in the ER before or since.  They whisked me right in.  As the nurse was readying me for the doctor, she laughingly said, “You look just like my dog!  He ate something he wasn’t supposed to last night, too, and his head got all big just like yours.”  I remember thinking as I began to slip out of consciousness that it would have been tragic if the last words I ever heard were that I had the face of a dog.

I remember being put on a steroid drip that made me shake a lot.  I heard later that the doctor told A and N that they could go back and see me one at a time, and there was an awkwardness as to who got to go first.  N was my college roommate and very close friend who I moved across the country with, and A was just my boyfriend of only six months.  A got the call, which I guess worked out alright in the end since we did eventually get married.

They held me in the ER till around four in the morning, at which point my face went down significantly.  The doctor had no doubt that shellfish was my undoing, which I found hard to believe because I had eaten it for twenty-plus years without a single problem.  I got home in the morning, EPI pen in hand.  I finally looked in the mirror for the first time.  I looked like Fat Albert. My face, especially my lips and eyelids, were still pretty swollen, although it was far better than me at my worst.  I can’t imagine what I looked like then.

In the end, of course the doctor was right and I took it as a sign that I should enjoy “pesce-“ no more.  Perhaps my spontaneous shellfish allergy is karma for pinching shrimp off of people’s plates at the Mexican restaurant I used to work at (good lord, I can’t believe I just admitted that).

I don’t remember how much the bill ended up being.  It’s crazy after all these years I’ve gotten reimbursed by the hospital for that visit, especially since that hospital no longer exists.  N and A, I owe you both a twenty spot.

My Central Park Shit Story

In the nearly fifteen years since it happened, I’ve told this story countless times but I have never recorded it for posterity until now.  Surely it goes without saying that any story with “shit” in the title runs the risk of being overtly scatological, so if you have a problem with anything involving human feces, well, perhaps you should give this post a pass.

I had just gotten off a red-eye after a week-long vacation featuring the most decadent meals imaginable.  Between all of the sinful eating and the way a plane can wreak havoc on your bowels, I hadn’t had a sufficient movement for probably twenty hours, give or take the six lost changing time zones.  This is most unlike me; my system, like most things about me, is pretty darn regular.

Upon landing, I was pretty anxious to get a run in to make up for all the damage done on my cheese-soaked travels.  As most runners know, I thought it best to wait until I had a mid-morning constitutional before I hit up Central Park.  I drank coffee to no affect.  I napped.  I ate an avocado omelet.  I waited hours, and nothing.  The morning turned to afternoon, and I saw my window of opportunity for daylight dwindling.  Against my better judgment, I headed out.

I always entered the park through the southwest corner at Columbus Circle and typically ran clockwise against the flow.  I’d like to say it’s because I’m a rebel who laughs in the face of convention, but really it was because the hills seemed easier in this direction.

The first three miles I was fine.  It was right when I started running up the hill in Harlem that my stomach began to feel uneasy.  I tried to ignore it, but within minutes I felt what must have been the fecal equivalent of a week’s worth of pasta, bread, cheese and one avocado omelet literally drop like a thud into my pelvic bowl.

With no bathroom in sight, I considered discretely running into the woods but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  I have actually had the misfortune of running past someone publicly pooping near this very spot, and on the Venn diagram of life, I did not want to have any overlap with that kind of crazy.  The only bathrooms I could think of were by the boathouse, about two miles away.  Liquid matter was starting to seep, but I was squeezing with all my might in hopes that I could make it.

I’d like to say those were the fastest two miles I’ve ever run, but honestly, how fast can anyone run in such a delicate condition?  I will say that the boathouse could not come fast enough.  When I finally got to the entrance, I was devastated to see there was a line out the door.

At this point, I was desperate.  I was sweating, and crying, and almost doubled over in pain.  I pleaded with all the women in front of me, most of them scowling Eastern bloc tourists who clearly were missing their borscht and vodka, “Please!  Please!  Can you let me go first?  I’m desperate!  Please?”  They all pretended not to understand a word I was saying.  I continued to wait in line, shaking.

It was finally my turn.  With the absolute worst timing ever, on my way to the vacated stall, within feet of the prize, my poor tired sphincter could fight no more.  Out it came.  And there was a lot.

What could I do?  I entered the stall to survey the damage.  I placed my Walkman – yes, Walkman! – on the ground since there was nowhere else to put it, pulled down my pants, and sat on the toilet.  I looked down in shock.  It’s true, my underwear and pants were in a sorry state, but I was pretty surprised by actually how little there was.  I mean, it certainly felt like a massive load, but the evidence simply didn’t support the suffering.

I decompressed on the toilet for a while, cleaned myself up as best I could.  I threw away my soiled underwear and tried to rectify the pants situation with wads and wads of one-ply toilet paper.  Finally I was decent enough to leave.  I bent down to pick up my Walkman and discovered on the ground, mere millimeters away, was a gigantic, soft pile of shit.  Yup, there it was.  It must have fallen out when I sat down and I was too traumatized to even notice.

I tried to clean it up as best I could, but to be honest at this point I was so disgusted with myself and everything in the gross public bathroom around me that I did, well, a crappy job.  As I left the stall to wash my hands thoroughly, I heard the woman entering after me let out a high-pitched scream.  I scurried out of the bathroom.

I walked delicately home and took the longest, hottest shower ever.  I probably should have also sterilized with alcohol, but I drank it instead.  At least my Walkman was unscathed.

Where the Streets Have No Name

My husband, A, and I went to Joshua Tree about a month ago.  Amateur trail runners that we consider ourselves to be, we decided to tackle the Boy Scout Trail, which to me sounded innocuous enough.  The worst that could happen is that it would turn us into precocious young homophobes with an ironic penchant for bright-colored scarves.

We did our due diligence and walked the first mile and a half the day before.  It was a sandy trail, slightly uphill, but nothing that we couldn’t handle at a slow pace.  We even encountered a family of four on their way to a few nights of camping.  All of them were fully kitted out in matching gear straight out of an REI catalog, including foot-high hiking poles for the pigtailed children.  As the littlest member looked up at me from under the brim of her safari hat, her beady eyes flashed me a withering look of scorn that only a child can give to an adult who is clearly too stupid to occupy the same trail as an experienced adventurer like herself.

The next day, my dad dropped us off at the northernmost trailhead.  I told him to pick us up ninety minutes later at the southern terminus, which gave us around a half hour cushion off our normal eight-mile pace.  Between us, we were armed with our satellite running watch and one bottle of water to share.  This may sound Spartan, but these are typical munitions for our mid-range city runs.  I never carry a cell phone since it’s cumbersome and expensive to fix if dropped.  Bringing one on this run would be especially useless given there’s no reception in the park anyway.

Some would conjecture that our first mistake was attempting a trail run in the first place, and of course they would be right.  But just to move the story forward, I am positing our first mistake was blithely assuming the trail cut through the mountain range we saw in the distance.  Around the two-mile mark, when the path dead-ended at the base of a rocky mountain, I quickly began to suspect that indeed the trail went over, not between, the mountains.  Every time we would climb up a mountain we’d have to search for where the trail resumed, but eventually it just disintegrated altogether.

Some would conjecture that continuing to run even though the trail disappeared would be our second mistake, and of course they would be right.  But just to move the story forward, I am positing that our second mistake was not taking the trail namesake’s motto to heart.  We weren’t prepared.  As we were lost on the desert plain in God’s country without even a tortoise to call friend, I realized that ours would be the skeletons that park rangers five years gone would be clucking over.  A’s bony fist would be found decomposed around the telltale indestructible piece of clear plastic, no longer a water bottle but a de facto latrine-slash-canteen that held evermore dwindling cycles of urine until we could produce no more.  We were the cautionary tale, the idiots who spat in the face of nature and went to the desert with but a few ounces of hydration and no means of communication.

We wandered aimlessly for a while, like nomadic tribes people without the wisdom of the elders to get them through the Sahara.  We tried looking for footprints and found nothing but animal tracks.  We did come upon an impression of a running shoe in the sand, but it turns out that it was my own footprint.  I’d like to say, upon this unfortunate discovery, I thought to myself calmly, “But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”  Instead, it was probably more like, “Oh my god!  We’re gonna DIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!”

I thought about letting A know that he could go ahead and eat me if I died first.  You would think that it would go without saying, but we are vegetarians.  I read an article where someone was making a case that breast-feeding isn’t vegan, but others were arguing it is still to be considered vegan because the source is giving consent.  So I wanted to put it out there that I was consenting to being eaten for A’s survival as to not besmirch his outstanding vegetarian cred.

I began wondering how long before my parents became alarmed and alerted the authorities.  As I was calculating how much we would owe Park Services for the Search & Rescue helicopter, A went off on his own and found a well-worn trail that looked full of promise.  We ran for about fifteen minutes before coming upon three hikers.  It turned out that they were from the same suburb where A grew up and one of them even knew his cousin.

They pointed us to the highway where we hitchhiked our way to where my family was waiting for us.  The girl who picked us up turned out to work in the city where we live.  It's so funny that after not seeing a soul for three hours, we meet two groups of strangers from our backyard.  Even though the desert is big, it's a small world after all.  She was traveling with her mother, who told us in mildly German-accented English that we were the nicest "hijackers" she’d ever come across.

In the end, we were only about an hour late.  It took me around thirty minutes to predict our demise, but fortunately A maintained a better outlook for our survival.  I’m certainly glad nature did not get the better of us, despite all the gloomy scenarios that were running through my head.  Perhaps next time I’ll at least take a compass.  Maybe I’ll figure out how to use it first.

Sometimes You Just Don’t Wanna

We just got back from a run that I really did not want to do.  Lately, our motivation just hasn’t been where it needs to be, and yes, I’m speaking for my husband, as well.  This is especially bad for me since I’m supposedly training for a race next month.  This one I’m doing solo since Mr. ExposedTanLines didn’t see fit to run on all all-female relay team (which, strangely, still ended up with two Y chromosomes on it).

Here are things to do when you don’t want to get your run in.  Be forewarned, these are not really tips, these are just things that get me personally through a rough running patch.

1) Don’t run.  It’s the truth and I’m not proud, but sometimes I just say fuggit, it’s not happening.

2) Pick a run you love.  And when I say “love”, I don’t mean the squidgy wubby-dubby-type love I have for my kitties that I feel firmly in my fallopian tubes.  I mean the “I can barely stand you” love that my mother had for me when I was caught writing “Tricia and Vanessa are whores!!!!” on the bathroom stall in fourth grade.  Running is always easier for me when the route is familiar and unchallenging.  Today we ran a familiar route conveniently right from our front door.  It included a two-miles stretch on a dirt trail and I actually saw a wild bunny, which I took as a reward for my resolve.

3) Go flat.  Don’t feel like running hills?  No problem.  Let yourself be flat and happy.  Far better to go easy than to not go at all.

4) Leave the running watch at home.  I trip out about my pace, so it’s an act of kindness to myself to not have that sword of Damocles hanging over my head.

5) Take your motivation from others.  The Los Angeles Marathon was run this morning.  If those elite athletes and weekend warriors can struggle through 26.2, I can certainly get in about an hour’s worth of road time.

Sometimes the idea of running is so much more difficult than the reality.  I know our slump will pass.  It better….I have a race to run.