Friday, March 30, 2007

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Does a Wannabe Trailrunner S*** In The Woods?

You bet we do! Holy cow, I've had plenty of runs where "holding it" really meant hauling to the end where I could safely empty the contents of my bowels into the nearest Port-a-Potty but this time...this time...there I was...out at the Boulder Reservoir...the closest ANYTHING civilization-esque being a house at the end of a half-mile long driveway. So it was either...sprint that hafl mile, praying someone was home the whole time, beat on their door, desperately try to convince them (if they were home) that I wasn't a lunatic, just out doing an eighteen-mile run and suddenly had the urgent need to evacuate my bowels, stat, hope that they would believe me AND not mind the lack of delicacy of the subject at hand, and allow me to use their restroom or there was...the ditch. Slightly hidden by a bare-branched tree (no spring leaves to cover up yet), about two feet down, a nice little incline from the road to the lip of the ditch givine me enough room (I hoped, I hoped) for cover. Grateful for the fact that my allergies require that I run with the equivalent of several boxes of Kleenex stuffed into the pockets of my gear, I dropped trou, squatted, and let loose.

Oh, come on now, it wasn't THAT bad. It wasn't like I some great diarrheaic fountain pouring out of me, just your average poop, no big deal. Until I saw the car. The car stopped at the stop sign at the T-intersection where every other car I'd seen while running along this route thus far turned the other way. The car that would, of course, luck of the Irish combined with luck of the ill-fated endurance athlete (I never knew there was such luck until this moment; the luck of the Irish I've been a victim of my entire life), turn this way. In my direction. I had maybe a block or two before they'd see me. I quickly draped my Nike jacket around me to cover as much flesh as possible without shitting all over the damned thing as well, and hung my head as the vehicle lumbered slowly by. I peeked up just in time to see an elderly couple staring at me, aghast. Whoops. Looks like I didn't do a good enough job of covering up.

Afterwards I resumed my run as qucikly as possible. I felt...lighter, less encumbered, for sure but oddly, animalistic. I even kicked a bunch of dirt off of the road to cover my scat and dug a crude hole in which I placed my used toilet paper, then carefully covered it and weighed it down with a rock. I felt suddenly like my cat, a bit, and in some weird way understood now why she felt the need to cover her scat. There were some sort of primal feelings in me that had been dormant my whole life, but suddenly and very strangely were awakened. I looked around me, at the dirt roads, at the multi-million dollar houses and ranches, at the communities bordering the edges of the foothills, and for the first time I realized just how far we've come, us humans, this singular and entirely-too-complex species I belong to. I sort of wondered, as I eased into my regular pace and my breathing regulated itself, had we really evolved or were we moving backwards? When did partial nudity (okay, people, the most theu could have seen were the sides of my behind and thighs) and disposal of waste become this clandestine act? And why did we allow it to become so? I pondered it for awhile and then, suddenly, as Ricky Martin's "She Bangs!" started blasting through my head I realized: Dondi, you're pondering the evolution of shit. A wide grin spread over my face, my head cleared, and I kept on truckin. There was a nasty hill I was about to encounter, and my concentration definitely needed some refocusing. I put my head down, increased my awareness of my heart rate, breathing and foot strike, and plodded on down the road.