Wednesday, October 1, 2008

I pee on your grave... sorry.

I have a confession to make. About 4 minutes before the gun of Anna's Angels 10 miler, surrounded by several hundred other runners at the start line, I had an urgent and nonnegotiable need to pee. It was probably due to the 40 oz of Gatorade I had guzzled in the preceding hour (which is more appropriate for 3 day trek across the desert instead of a 1 hour run on a cool morning).
The start line was in some sort of commercial office space "park", with acres of concrete and generic brick buildings as far as I could see. No porta-john in sight, I just started running in a random direction looking for some private place to release my excess sport drink. I immediately spotted a clump of trees on an island in a parking lot, ran up into it and immediately started relieving myself. As the bladder emptied and the seconds to the start ticked away, I nervously looked around, expecting to see some old lady or police officer staring at me in disgust. I was quite surprised to instead see several old gravestones behind me, in the middle of the trees. I was peeing in a grave yard.
Now, I don’t believe in an afterlife or ghosts or anything, but still, peeing in a grave yard just seems wrong. It really brought my public urination to a whole new level of inappropriateness. I still had a good 60 seconds and 20 oz to go so I started weighing my options. I could stop and find someplace else to go, but finding a non-graveyard place to pee and making it back to the start in 3 minutes seemed like a long shot. Plus, I wasn’t really peeing ON someone’s grave, just nearby. And I already had discharged one bottle of used Gatorade, so what was one more? So I finished up, and ran back to the start.
So if you have some relatives that were buried on a farm in Morrisville that was then turned into an office park… sorry about that.

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