The Poo Barrier

I am not talking about the sound barrier – nor am I talking about the pain barrier, although both of these can be associated with my running style.

I am talking about the poo barrier.  The point in your run when you realise that ‘yes – carry on and enjoy the run’ or ‘nope – gonna need to unload somewhere quick sharp!’

Now for me, this normally happens at around 1 mile – the mile mark is also my first pain barrier to cross (the second is at 3 miles) so at that mile marker, my discomfort can sometimes be two fold.  Take Wednesday night for instance, first night back on land and headed out for a quick 3 miler on Nantucket.  Went for a dump before I left the boat thinking this would be a good run but was foiled at the 1.02 mile mark by the high pressure build up in my butt hole.  It was so quick and intense that I knew my run was over unless I could offload – worse still, I knew I had to walk or I would be in severe trouble.  Luckily for me, there was a restaurant nearby.

I walked in, still clenching.  Asked the greeter at the door if I could use the toilet and to my joy she said yes.  Of course I made it to the ceramic god to drop my payload like a B52 in the Cold war and even managed a quick sharp turn around so that I could get running again.

There is one very huge problem with this though.  Try running a mile and then sitting down for a couple of minutes.  As I entered the restaurant, I was still looking pretty fresh, after all, a mile is easy – just a warm up right?  Then sit on the toilet for a few minutes and wait for the sweat to appear.  So, that very nice girl that greeted me in a reasonably calm and non sweaty manner, is then seeing me exit some 5 minutes later covered and dripping in sweat, in fact sweating like a rapist is a phrase that would describe it best.  Worse still, she knew I only wanted to use the toilet so what the hell had I been doing in there for 5 minutes?????

To add insult to injury, when I took a look on my Runkeeper satellite tracker, it clearly shows a spike in activity where I had to stop to use the dunny.  Click the link below and wait for it to load, scroll down below the map and look at the blue line – nice spike at my pitstop.

http://runkeeper.com/user/hairygoose/activity/110081059?&mobile=false

I will leave you now – I have some work to do before we take this old bus racing.