The Order of Things

I'm not the only one who has this problem. You see, when you're in a long race like a half marathon or a marathon, part of your registration fee goes toward setting up little niceties such as porta-potties along the route or having volunteers handing you liquids and Gu at regular intervals. So, besides being continually hydrated and fueled, you can also empty out your insides when you just really have to pinch one out. But on a training run, you don't have this luxury. Sure, you could engineer a solution by running loops and having some sort of rest stop on that loop but it's a pain.

But it's worse than that. For me anyway, I get mildly anxious before a long training run because, let's face it, I'm not the world-level athlete I was once, and I'm using too many commas in this sentence. Also, when you're running long distances, you want to relax and not waste any energy, something that gets more difficult in direct proportion to the amount of sphincter contraction you must endure. The solution? Poo before you run.

That's not as easy as it sounds though, because unless you defecate with metronomic regularity, you just may run in to (pun intended) a run before poo situation. The absolute worst is when you get something out before you run, then start your run, and then 10 miles in, most literally, shit. Just one more challenge in life to deal with, I suppose. At least I made it through this entire post without one Foucauldian reference. Oops. Merde encore.