To my running friends...TMI for everyone else ( I warned you!)

   It was SO hard to get up this morning but I did it. 6:30am rise and shine, after not getting home until 12:15am from my Halloween party and not actually getting in bed until almost 1am, I was tired! It was my choice to stay out that late knowing that I needed to get up early to get my long run in for the weekend before the rest of Shanghai wakes up so i couldn't feel bad for myself. Sometimes, there are things that you think that you don't want to do but after doing them you know your are a better person (or in this case a healthier person) for doing it.

   So i was out the door and started my morning run.  I was feeling good, maybe a little dry mouth from the 3 beers I had the night before but good. I ran a route that was very similar to the previous long run I did 2 weeks ago; ran a little west, then north, then east all the way to The Bund. About 3.5 miles in I could start to feel my stomach rumble..."Oh no! Not now" was all I could think. Sometimes you get the rumble but you can convince your body to forget about it but that wasn't the type of rumbling that I was getting. Ok, mile 4.5 this was getting serious...and all I could think about was if I was in the States I could easily explain to a store owner that it was an emergency and that they MUST allow me to use their bathroom but here I can't do that. I passed 2 signs for bathrooms at this point, both of which seemed to not be in obvious locations to which the signs were pointing, and there was no guarantee that they would even be open this early in the morning. Plus, I knew if I could make it to The Bund that there was a higher chance of a western-style bathroom. Mile 5.25, I can see that I'm getting SO close to The Bund but my bowels were going down hill fast. Should I stop running or keep going, OMG the torture!!

Seeing these signs can be a mixed bag of feelings. Amazing if you
find it easily and it's somewhat clean or complete torture b/c even though
the arrow points a specific direction, the bathroom is no where to be found.

   I ran to the first bathroom sign that I could find at The Bund. It was open, clean and had western style toilets. I had avoided all international embarrassment to the US! And felt a huge wave of relief. I was in the clear...I could now turn around and run home no problem. Miles 6, 7, 7.5...what the heck, my stomach was rumbling AGAIN but worse this time. I'm SO glad that I brought tissues with me (FYI bathrooms in China do not typically have TP for users, you have to bring your own) b/c now I was going to have to find one of those bathroom signs along the street. I saw one, it said 100M ahead, so I run then all of a sudden I passed another sign that said 100M behind me...what the heck, I didn't see the bathroom anywhere. At this point, there was no time for me to turn around to look for it closer, I needed to keep going. Mile 8, it hit! This part is for Megan: it was like that time running our long run Friday evening along the Spring Water Corridor. I literally could only run 5 feet before my bowels felt like they were going to explode, no bathroom in site (the only reason I survived that night was Megan and her motivational talking (and trying to distract me))...it was happening all over again but this time in a foreign country, by myself!! I was to the point where I had to stop running and only concentrating on not embarrassing myself and even with this I wasn't going to make it very long.

   For those that have never done long distance running or other endurance sports, pooping one's pants is well kept dirty secret, but it happens more often then you would like to believe. I have at least one friend who this has happened to (you know who you are, actually several people know who you are!). At some point during training you can loose control of bodily functions and one of them is your intestinal tract. Especially in running, your body is being pounded by the second, there is no down-time. In my running group back in PDX, "code brown" is the term we use when there is a bowel emergency and a bathroom needs to be found immediately. I've been running with the same group of ladies now for about 2 1/2 years and think we've had about a half dozen "code browns" total. Read this article on ESPN, worth the 5mins that it will take you to read it, I swear!

Yes, everybody poops. Even your favorite athlete. The difference is, sometimes they do it in front of millions of people.

  Back to my story from this morning. At this point you probably think that it happened to me. I am happy to report that it didn't but I was definitely the closest I have ever been to that nightmare. I, luckily, found another bathroom sign and the facility was easy to find. There is no luxury of western-style toilets in bathrooms like this so I was going to have to squat, which after 8 miles of running, wasn't sure that my legs could handle it. I was really hoping that I could make it 6 months with only having to squat for #1 but now my hopes were shattered. Squatting wasn't as horrible as I thought that it would be and now I felt a lot better, again. I still had 2 more miles to go so I was a little worried that I no longer had any tissues left, what if I have another emergency?!

For those that have never seen a squatter. Don't worry,
this is not one from today! And yes, I did take this picture.

   I made it home safe and sound. I sure hope I don't have another run like this for a very long time! The only up-side to all of this is that I ran one of my fastest 10 miles ever!!