You’ll see why this photo is pertinent at the end of this blog. But what’s that floating in the pool?
Those of us who run, ride and swim get to have our fair share of encounters with interesting bathroom options. At races the proverbial Porta Pottie landscape can range from wonderful… to wondering if you’re going to catch an awful disease.
Stopping at a forest preserve or park to do your business can also create interesting considerations. Typically the toilets in these locations are what we might call Stop and Drop structures. Just you, a toilet seat and hopefully ten feet of clearance between your butt and the frightening concoction of human waste and detritus below.
Let’s admit that we don’t like to think about what’s going on below us. It’s a necessary evil that we expel human waste, but philosophizing about it resolves no problems. In a pinch, so to speak, there is no room for complaint about the nature of the facilities. You sit there in the heat or cold grunting away because to continue on without relief might lead to a shorts disaster. Then you prepare to move on by doing some basic hygiene, usually with a few sheets of one-ply toilet paper, and toss it in and leave. No need to flush.
Squat thrust
This is closer to what human beings did for hundreds of thousands of years. Only in the last 150 years or so did people actually get to use flush toilets with liquid sanitation plants waiting to receive our best and worst efforts.
But in the public sphere, we can all Thank God for decently maintained public toilets. They seem generally to be on the increase these days. For example, the local Starbucks where we meet to run on Saturday mornings always keeps their restrooms clean. The same holds true for all the other Starbucks and other coffee shops I visit. All seem to be well-maintained with clean facilities if a visiting slob has not ruined things for everyone else.
Even gas stations seem to have upped their game in the clean toilet department. And we all know what a welcome sight a gas station with a restroom can be during an eight-mile run wjem the urge to go becomes so fierce your butt feels like it will explode. So you mince into the station and plop down to do your business, grateful perhaps, that the restroom is also clean.
As mentioned, the problem in this formula arises when slobs wreck the joint. Some people don’t seem to have any control of their bowel or urinary functions. That action is never a pretty scene. Understand that the etiquette of all this is an issue that comes down to one ideal: Leave a place better than you found it. Suffice to say this is not always the case, because we have all turned around when faced with really bad bathroom conditions.
A Word of Thanks
So here’s a word of thanks to all those people whose job it is to maintain clean restrooms. It can’t be a fun or pretty job, especially when a flush toilet backs up and needs to be fixed. That’s got to be the worst situation in the world for everyone involved. Talk about your gritty, disgusting situations. Yet somehow the toilets do eventually get flushed and back and in working order. Someone has to do it.
So let’s all agree not to take that for granted. Compliment the help at your local service station or coffee shop, department store or gym if the restrooms are clean and well-maintained. And be thankful for the convenience of flush toilets, because squatting in the weeds as they did for centuries is not as fun as it looks. Granted, we all wind up there eventually if we’re out cycling or running. When you’ve got to go, any tree or clump of grass is a haven.
But above all, please don’t poop in the pool. It takes a really long time to flush those things.
This species of Running Creature vacillates between sticking to a prescribed running route and taking what is offered by circumstance such as traffic lights. The Decisive Drifter is often seen running in place glancing nervously at a watch or Garmin, adjusting their hat or shorts or crossing arms over the breast to cover erect nipples under a running bra. All these behaviors fall under the category of evolutionary adaptation known as “redirected aggression” as exhibited by birds that grow anxious and engage in “normal” activities such as “bill-wiping” when danger approaches. Decisive Drifters are a common species through their range, which is the entire world. Sometimes they can be seen in small groups on street corners, chittering and chattering to each other while making strange motions with their arms. This may or may not be associated with mating rituals, or it may just be an innate response to sweaty armpits.
This Running Creature rarely finishes a run without raising their phone above their head to take a groundward facing self portrait to post on Instagram and share through Facebook and Twitter and ten other social media all linked by a sharing app loaded with 1300 other Selfies of said Creature running in some country that isn’t really identifiable because the scenery is not really identifiable when the camera is pointed toward the ground. Typically the Caption on these photos reads: “Just finished a great run! Wish you could be as runnie as me!”
Summer gear needs to be easy-on, easy-off. It needs to breathe and go with just about anything else you put on your body.
One of the problems never solved on my former road bike, the Felt 4C, was a difficulty in getting the chain to move from the small ring to the big ring. The derailleur was Dura-Ace and the setup was quality Shimano. So it wasn’t the quality of the equipment. Mechanics and friends fussed with the gearing but it never quite felt clean when shifting into the bigger ring. It would pause or slip off at crucial moments.
From character we move to the broader concept of worldview. That is the foundational set of beliefs that inform one’s perspective about everything from the structure of the universe to the leaning of our politics.
Like it or not, most human beings grapple with the challenges of a career. Our working lives or vocation are expressions of who we are. This can be transplanted, of course, into avocation, and many athletes find satisfaction in this regard. Their personalities become immersed in a sport and that becomes an identity. But when injury or other circumstance knocks that chain off the gears, life can get complicated. Friend networks get strained, and even spousal relationships when one person continues in the sport and the other is forced to the sidelines. Humility is important in getting one’s “career” back on track in any case. But so is a solid sense of personal pride and recognition of individual value. Those are some of the hardest attributes to keep on track in the face of career loss. But it’s crucial to survival in every sense.
In life, that might mean your backyard with trees wafting in the breeze, or next to a river, where flecks of light shimmer off the surface.Or watch some clouds form and move past. Let the gears of existence move without your effort and you may well find yourself moving in new directions.
Which is why it felt so marvelous to pedal up the road north through Fermi, past a tall row of secretive pines and broad fields opposite the woods where people exercise their dogs and coyotes also frolic and lay down their scent to vex the domesticated hounds. Such is the balance between city and country life. The lines of domestication often get blurred.
This morning at swim I arrived five minutes late and struggled to get my gear into place. Finally, things were ready and I wandered over to the dry erase board to study the assigned workout. Bullets swim coach Chris Colburn pens it all out so you can see what you’re supposed to do each day. Typically none of us can memorize the whole set at that time of day so you’ll see swimmers perched at pool’s edge with goggles up on their heads squinting to read the next set.
can also live outside the water and walk across land to get from pond to pond. This would be a very helpful skill among triathletes seeking to become better in transition from Swim Out to the bike. Grow some fins and your swimming will improve, but being able to breathe through your skin while trundling up some sandy beach onto a sidewalk to transition could be really helpful too.
*The sequence of events ot which I’m referring is the cellulitis that somehow appeared on the back of my hand earlier this summer. The Urgent Care people assigned antibiotics, which I merrily ingested for several weeks. When they were over, my gut bacteria was all messed up and I got this weird condition called C-Diff, in which bad gut bacteria takes over your lower abdominal region and turns your butt region into a zoo without cages. 
When watching a cycling or triathlon broadcast, one often hears the announcers refer to an athlete as having “good legs.” And while that is often true in the sense of appearance, the condition to which they’re actually referring is the athlete’s conditioning and how it is paying off that day.
This last component is what most distance athletes who coach themselves learn to neglect. Training fatigue is your friend, but only if you are able to teach your body to perform under duress at the race level you want to achieve. That’s why some triathletes struggle to improve their runs. They simply do not do enough pure running volume to require the muscles to perform at a faster tempo. Brick runs will teach you to run tired to some degree, but the real secret is planning your run training to have at least one period per week, ideally with back to back days, where you press your body into service with a long run and then come back the next day with intensity training on the track. That is how you teach the brain to cope with training (and racing) fatigue.
The method here is to tap your cumulative fitness by planning around paces that one is already able to do in training. If a 43:00 10K runner can do 7:00 pace interval work or under during practice, that is evidence there is potential to manage that pace through the early going. But if one does not back off in training until a couple days before the race, there is not much training lost, yet the legs will feel fresher for those test races.
There is risk in the taper, in that athletes can be prone to relaxing their diet by putting things in the body that have not been ingested during training. Even a casual Coca Cola when one is not generally drinking soda during training can really mess up an athlete’s stomach. And a bad gut almost never leads to good legs.
Diver Caroline Matscusheva of Argentina was one of six slightly stoned athletes who showed up late for the competition. “We all met up on Facebook and agreed to fly to Bolivia to meet up in La Paz,” she related. “But My God, we didn’t party that much. The games are still in August, right? August isn’t over, is it?”
that we know now,” the two midfielders admitted. “We thought for certain we had won enough games to make it to the Olympics. Perhaps we were celebrating too much and did not check the Internet.”
oking Spagnoli kept rubbing his red eyes while alternately nibbling on PowerBars in each of his two hands. Periodically he would set the nutrition bars down on his gym bag and reach for his bottle of water, then seem to forget what he was doing, and grab the two nutrition bars again. “Io sono davvero molto in forma. Questo fa schifo!” he insisted.
Which is why it’s time to talk about your hip flexors. This illustration shows the precise point where a group of muscles and tendons convene in the area known as your “hip flexors” to make it possible for you to run.
Think about the many runners you see out on the road. How many actually appear to engage in a fluid stride, one that moves freely from the hips rather than scuffling along. You can see the difference in hip flexion between the fluid stride of the gal versus the tighter stride of her father. Granted, they are in a slightly different phase of the running stride. But age is no friend to our hip flexion capacity. That’s the point.
Think about the comparative hip flexibility of high hurdlers in track. They can run with their legs extended horizontally and snap them through all the way into the next stride. Their hip flexors are exceptionally loose and strong at the same time.
What we’re saying here is that having really strong hip flexors is a very sexy thing when it comes to how well you run, ride and swim. There’s always something about watching really fluid looking athletes that is visually pleasing. Think of those sexy male swimmers in the Olympic pool. Slick as seals and just as fluid, you might say.
The world moves on a woman’s hips
We Run and Ride 