This is a story my girlfriend likes to tease me about all the time - but I feel like it warrants it because it's a moment of sheer stupidity on my part.
A few years ago, I had just started college. When I was in highschool, I ran cross country, so in trying to keep with that I would exercise in the gym regularly. I found out there was a 5k going on not too far from my house, so I payed the fee and signed up. At the time, I wore
vibrams because I had a bad back and bad knees. Vibrams are good shoes. Great shoes. But, if you don't have perfect feet, you should stay far far away from them. You see, they're designed to fit like a glove, and if your foot doesn't fit the mold, you're going to have a bad time.
In short, I hurt my feet wearing these things. A lot. For example, just before this race, these shoes scrapes all the skin off the side of one of my feet and dug it raw. I obviously couldn't race like that, and with shoes like this, I couldn't use a conventional bandage either as it would just get ripped off after my second step. So I looked online.
What I found was a multitude of ways to bandage scrapes, but the one that really caught my eye was one involving eggs. Y'see, apparently if you boil an egg, and peel it, the inner membrane of the eggshell can be smeared over your scrape and it will act like a resilient bandage. Which it did. It worked very well. Only problem was I forgot to boil the egg.
Yup. I essentially smashed a raw egg into an open cut and thought everything would be
fine.
I woke up with salmonella.
But, I already spent 25 bucks to attend this race so I was damned if I was missing out on it. So I jumped out of bed, fought the nausea, and took the bus to the nearby park. I went to the registration, did my warm up, socialized a
ton, and then, I felt it - the scraping was back. I popped off my shoe and looked at the eggshell, and it had already begun to erode.
Rad, I thought to myself. I gave myself salmonella for absolutely no reason.
I sighed into infinity itself, hobbled over to the registration, looked at them and asked.
"Do you guys any masking tape? If not, see through is fine, I don't care at this point."
The coordinators handed me a roll of masking tape. I bent over. Mummified my goddamn foot. Handed it back, and thanked them.
It felt weird as hell, but honestly it was fairly comfortable. I should have done it earlier. The only thing that was bothering me now was the insatiable urge to take a dump everywhere and puke my guts out - but that had to wait because the race was about to start and I wasn't about to be out 25 dollars from my own stupidity.
All in all though, the race went very well. There's something about running with purpose that puts a lot of your bodily functions on hold. Until you near the finish line that is. Holy hell I swear, the moment I bombed the last hill and saw the crowd and finish line everything inside of me just sort of knew. Not so much the nausea, but
definitely from the other end.
I have never run so fast in my life.
Y'see, generally, with races like this, the way it works is there will be someone at the finish line holding a popsicle stick that has a number on it. The number corresponds to which place you came in. Clenching my cheeks, I sprinted through the finish line, snatched the popsicle stick, and continued sprinting all the way to the bathroom.
Turns out I came in 6th place. Not bad.
