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Note – An alternate title considered for this post was “Give Me Your John Moosecock”. It was rejected for obvious reasons.
Today I signed my life away, readily agreeing to participate “at my own risk”, as the activity is “potentially hazardous” and can result in ”bodily injury or death”. Daaamn – you’d think I was doing something really dangerous, like going back-to-school shopping, rather than merely running a marathon. I’d like to tell you the particulars of this upcoming run, but I have the sinking suspicion that my vast readership is comprised entirely of my husband, my sister (Hi, Weenie!), and dozens of crazed parolees with a penchant for cyber-stalking mediocre runners. And I don’t want that Weenie knowing my exact whereabouts, ’cause you just never know.
The registration form also required me to attest to the fact that I am “medically able and properly trained.” HA! I paid my $55, so if I show up on race day in an iron lung dragging an IV pole behind me and rubbing 200 pounds of stomach lard that I have christened “Bea Lubber” then those race officials are just gonna have to deal with it.
Finally, the last strange bit on the registration form was a line reading “Medical problems officials should be aware of”. It took all of the self-control I could muster to refrain from writing ”Responds with projectile vomiting to sentences ending with a preposition.” and “Prone to violent corn-filled assplosions.”
Apparently we runners are so used to signing waivers such as these, that we barely notice. J. and I found a great fun run last night, and they, too, required us to sign a release. I think it said something like:
“Blah blah chance of paralysis. Blahdy blah blah imminent death. Yadda yadda yadda fatal boob chafe. Yackity yack yack running induced coma.”
I hastily rendered my Moose Hancock and took off running.
Team Yonker is much like a presidential candidate discussing a timetable for troop withdrawal – constantly changing and often confused. In its original incarnation, TY was comprised of M, RunningBurro and yours truly. When RunningBurro moved abroad, M. and I weren’t a duo long before we coerced forced encouraged J. to join us. Now our Fearless Leader and team namesake has moved on as well. (It truly bewilders me that one would choose family, stellar career opportunities, the adventure of a lifetime, and pleasant weather over boob chafe, crotch sweat and muddy shorts, but whatever. Some people have some preeety strange priorities, I guess.) Today TY morphed again, this time accepting into the fold a brand new runner/friend, L., as well as our infrequent guest runners, BoyMoose and niece-o’- J. We are, indeed, a motley crew.
It was interesting to see the run from L.’s perspective. As a newcomer, she noticed things that I now take for granted, including the “rivers of spit” that flow through the course. Fellow runners – knock it the fuck off. That’s just nasty, and you’re giving us a bad name. One can’t help toxic menopausal stank and the occasional trickle of butt juice, but spitting can definitely be controlled. ‘Cause we’ve got to have some standards, people.
L. also was appalled at the manner in which we runners dispose of cups at the water stops. I, too, was originally horrified by this, but now I litter with the best of them. I’m like the Exxon Valdez of the running community. Screw you, tree huggers – I’m just bummed that the cups are paper rather than styrofoam ’cause it’s always been my dream to leave a legacy of filth and debris for my descendants.
L., BoyMoose and niece-o’-J. all did very well at the 5K, especially considering the course was very hilly. J. and I tackled the 10K, and let’s just say that neither one of us PR’d. I was almost 4 whole minutes slower than I was on this exact same course last year AND I was poned by a woman in a running skirt.The shame is almost more than I can bear, frankly. Despite my dismal performance, I placed second in my age group and earned a medal. If I didn’t like shiny tangible reminders of my running glory so much, I’d encase it in styrofoam and throw it in a pristine meadow somewhere.
Back in May, Mr.Moose and the calves gave me a Sports Authority gift card for Mother’s Day as I am NOT the kind of mom/wife who can even pretend to appreciate traditional Mother’s Day gifts. Flowers, macaroni necklaces or those really lame ass coupons good for back rubs and dish washing really put my fur up. I mean, WTF? I birthed a collective baby weight of 17 pounds, nine ounces so for Christ’s sake treat me right. This means cold, hard cash and/or goods and services related to running. It also means you should be rubbing my back while washing my dishes each and every day, and not just on Mother’s Day. They’re very well trained now, those moose o’ mine, and I’m proud to say that my last brooch made entirely of pasta, glitter and googly eyes is just a distant memory, albeit one that still can make me shudder in revulsion.
Though staffed entirely by sedentary, surly bastards, Sports Authority just might be my favorite place to shop. In fact, I seriously believe that all other stores can just go ahead and close their doors forever, because anything I could possibly ever need or want can surely be found within SA’s enormous red walls. Unless I need Bibb lettuce. Or flavored condoms. Or a disco ball – in which case I’ll just root around beneath my couch cushions, ’cause one can generally find the few things that Sports Authority lacks stuck firmly ‘neath my cushions. (I only wish that I was making this up, but just recently, L. discovered Mr.Moose’s very used Q-tip beneath the couch cushions. Yeah, nothing says “Welcome to our humble home” like the congealed, brown wax of a moose’s inner ear.)
So today I put that Sports Authority gift card to good use and procured for myself the following schweet, schweet items: Body Glide (Good-bye, nasty, nasty boob chafe!), Nike running shirt (Sorry, small Mexican sweat shop children whom I’ve exploited), Under Armour long sleeve running shirt (Sorry, again, small Mexican sweat shop children whom I’ve exploited), and Aspire shorts and jog bra. (To what are they aspiring, I wonder? To be a giant, polluting company large enough to effectively exploit a labor force comprised entirely of small Mexican children? That’s it, I bet. ‘Cause it’s probably not nearly as satisfying exploiting the small children of Macau.)
This morning, since Mr.Moose and his buddy, D., wanted to go “fishing”, I decided to do my long run at Pollutadaga Lake Park, so that I could run whilst they “fished”. (Please note that all references to “fishing” will remain in quotation marks until the true sexual orientations of both Mr.Moose and D. have been determined. We’ve all seen “Brokeback Mountain”, I think, and so we understand that a certain type of fellow might sometimes confuse “fishing” with “fellating”. And Mr. Moose did bring a rather phallic snack (bananas, for God’s sake!) for the two of them to enjoy, while leaving me, the mother of his calves, sans snack. Oh, and did I mention that Mr.Moose sleeps in a PINK bedroom and that D. recently sent Mr.Moose FLOWERS?!?! OK already – maybe I’m just a bit sensitive right now, as I’ve had to endure countless lesbian jokes since my last posting. D. wants to hook me up with a flannel wearing trucker-ess named Griselda and Mr. Moose can’t look at me without crudely wagging his tongue between his V-splayed fingers. Damn – you wax poetic about the boobs of one hot 20-year-old and you never hear the end of it.)
So Pollutadaga is a really great place to run. It has miles of roads and every Sunday morning it is closed to vehicular traffic so that walkers, runners, bikers, roller bladers and bajillions of angry geese can do their thing. It’s fairly scenic, and for minutes at a time one can nearly forget that one is running alongside the most polluted U.S. body of water. (Thanks a bunch, Allied Chemical Corporation, but in the future you might want to view the lake as sacred to the Iroquois, and the site of the “first representative democracy in the West”, rather than as just a handy dandy repository for all that pesky mercury. Fuckin’ white people.)
I ran 20.05 miles at Pollutadaga today, mostly in the pouring rain. My sneakers and socks were completely water logged, but until the thunder came, it was a great, great time. My pace was decent (8:47 minute/mile), and even though I’d forgotten my iPod, I still had tunes, thanks to my friend, L. Whoever said you couldn’t run to “What The World Needs Now Is Love, Sweet Love” has never been out in a thunderstorm with angry geese on their tail.
I burned 2,460 calories according to Vic, and consumed two Power Bars and two bananas while running. Mr.Moose and D. did NOT catch any keepers, (probably too busy admiring the moose muscle rather than the zebra mussel if you know what I mean.) and sane people/moose do not eat fish from Pollutadaga, anyway. On the way home, though, I more than made up for my caloric deficit. Mr.Moose and I stopped at the bakery and purchased two loaves of Italian bread, two cannollis, two danish and two macaroons. All that running and “fishing” sure does leave one famished.
Imagine, if you will, that twenty years ago Halle Berry and Denzel Washington combined their perfect genes and created the world’s most ridiculously attractive human being. Now fast forward to the present time, and imagine sweating, hulking, nasty, veiny, blotchy ME running beside this goddess. Believe me when I tell you that nothing decimates one’s self esteem more effectively than running with a hot 20-year-old.
It’s not that I couldn’t hold my own, because I did, and rather admirably for an oldster- It’s just that she looked so much better while doing it. Twenty-year-olds get dewy and attractively flushed when exercising, while we nearly-forty-somethings just flood the roadways with our toxic menopausal stank. Twenty-year-olds perspire ever so delicately, always into their perfect cleavage, while we nearly-forty-somethings, for some inexplicable reason, excrete buckets and buckets of crotch sweat. So I’m looking like I have a very serious incontinence problem, and she’s looking like Sex Babe Number One in every guy’s spank bank.
It goes without saying, of course, that the love child of Halle and Denzel is free of the flaws that comprise a good 90% of my physique – varicose veins, cellulite, and age spots would not dare to rest on her when there are countless hags like me to menace. And let’s not even talk about the boobs. See, unlike my own pair which were crammed beneath three very stained jog bras into my standard shelf-o’-tits shape, hers were actually identifiable as two separate entities. While I don’t think I’m a lesbian, I must admit they were very, very fetching.
And don’t even thinkabout posting coments about how I should derive my self esteem not from my appearance but from my character, because that will surely make me hurl. I have weak character, damn it, and I’m not the least bit interested in developing it.
(Again, my most sincere apologies to the perverts researchers who have stumbled across this blog after Googling “Halle Berry lesbian boobs.”)
Today, over 10,000 runners and countless spectators/booze hounds are descending upon downtown Utica for the best 15K ever – the Boilermaker. This race has it all, including elite Kenyan athletes, popsicles at the water stops, live music (as opposed to that boring dead kind), a stellar fireworks display, enough crowd support to make the slowest runner feel like a rock star and a visit from a llama (The one from the Utica Zoo, not that dude from Tibet). I lurve this run, but due to a combination of poor planning and cheapness, I broke my three-year streak and missed it this year. Instead, I spent the morning painting my bedroom, sometimes with a roller but mostly with my hair. (What color is my room, you ask? Imagine bologna vomit with just a hint of baboon butt. Now double the grotesque qoutient and you’ll nearly have it. B. and M. will likely miss a thing or two about Frostburgg, including Mr.Mooses’s vast repertoire of anal jokes and my infrequently, begrudgingly presented lemon bars, but trust me when I tell you that they will NOT miss this paint. Big thanks, Bradeline, and I really mean that, but in the future you might want to steer clear of that “Oops!” rack at Home Depot.)
Though I missed the Boilermaker, I still plan to engage in one of my favorite post-race pastimes: the evaluation of the results. I lurve to examine the results page, and have been known to spend more time perusing the data than I actually took to run the race. I pay particularly close attention to the data from the F35-39 age group, as it is here where my nemeses reside. One (and by “one” I mean a cyber stalking, maniacally competitive lunatic named “Loose Moose”) sees the same names appear over and over, and even though one does not know these other runners from a hill of bologna vomit, one finds oneself becoming veeeery interested in their performances. At the smaller runs, I actively try to scope out the identities of my nemeses, paying careful attention at the awards ceremony to match names with faces. I sure don’t want these whackos knowing my schweet identity, however, so on the rare occassions when I win an age group award, I just accept it incognito. I’m thinking that bologna vomit colored hair might make the perfect disguise.
So the monsters at FIRST have deemed that today was a 20-miler at a pace 45 seconds slower than my predicted marathon pace. I can think of any number of things I would rather do, including lancing the boils from angry syphilitic ducks, but like a good little running drone, off I went. My iPod performed flawlessly, belting out songs sure to inspire ANY runner. (Gloria Gaynor deserves to be canonized for her incredible contributions to the world of running with ”I Will Survive”, don’t you agree? No?! You DON’T agree? Humph…Ye of little sense and musical refinement.)
Though the iPod worked beautifully, the Garmin – not so much. Most days, Victor McCrapBag Garmin and I have a love/hate relationship going on, but today it was all hate, baby – buckets and buckets of nasty, oozy hate. Other than to tell the time, that fucker couldn’t do one thing right today. I got myriad “Weak GPS Signal” screens, followed by insane, frantically changing screens proclaiming that I had completed mile 1, mile 2, mile 3 in rapid, nonhuman succession. Even after Vic came to his senses, the first several miles that I supposedly ran in 0:13, 0:06, 0:09 wildly upset the true average and caused moronic Vic to report my average pace per mile as 2:07. HA!!!
Or maybe Vic is not moronic but, instead, deadly accurate and I AM SPEED PERSONIFIED!!!! Perhaps my unusually modest nature has caused me to downplay my gifts all these years, so someone better consider notifying the Olympic Track Team ASAP. Oh, sure – those stuffy Olympic types will initially suspect a combination of faulty Garmin data and rampant steroid abuse, but only until they get a good look at my secret weapon. (Duh! It’s Veinessa, my varicose vein. Clearly she is not just leg candy, but a sentient, patriotic vein, ready and willing to pump adrenaline, testosterone and pure, pure speed straight into my leg muscles so that the US of A takes home the gold.)
So check me out this summer, suckahs. I’ll be the one bopping my head to Gloria Gaynor, affectionately petting Vainessa AND finishing the mile before those other “runners” are even off the starting blocks.
Warning: If you’ve come here today for your daily dose of scatological humor or a revolting retelling of my latest battles with loose bowels and/or extreme boob chafe, then you will be sorely disappointed. Today I will be exploring a side of me that I ordinarily keep tightly under wraps. That’s right – even we moose have warm, fuzzy sides and (ugh…gag…barf) emotions.
M. has moved and I am a wreck. It is obscenely quiet next door, and I am already plotting ways to drive the new, unsuspecting and undoubtedly inferior neighbors far, far away.
So here is my ode to M., with sincere gratitude and love for all that she has brought to me and mine.
Before Madeline,
I thought good fences made good neighbors.
I was certain that only super heroes could run marathons, and damn it, but I had no cape.
I believed that Ph.D. stood for “pompous, humorless drone”.
I thought that those pesky friendly extrovert types were all completely faking it.
I believed that Downward Facing Dog was something that consenting adults did behind closed doors.
I equated a Southern accent with a less-than-keen intellect.
I was certain I had enough friends, thank you very much.
I was positive that excessive socialization (or smiling) on my part could result in death.
Clearly, I was a misinformed dumbass, and M. has helped me to see the light.
Trivial things I’ve received from M. include a stellar mac and cheese recipe, an obsession with running, a wary interest in yoga, and all her pantry and freezer items that could not fit in the U-Haul. (A partial list of the latter include a 4-lb. bag of peanuts, frozen talapia, Kashi protein drink, Pupperoni dog treats and enough pepper jack cheese to warp the shelves of my fridge. I fully intend to mix up those tasty ingredients into a unique casserole and impress the good folks of Frostburgg at our next potluck.)
M.’s impact on my life, however, has been anything but trivial. I am stronger, healthier, more confident, better informed, more widely read, friendlier, and less judgmental because of her presence. She is one of the most remarkable, amazing individuals I have ever known and I will miss her desperately.
