The "Tail End" of My Training

Well, one week till the big event! Think of me next Sunday between 8:00 AM and 1:15 PM. I’ll be out there on Whidbey Island with hundreds of others willing my body to repeat the same motion for over five hours.

Send your thoughts, prayers, intentions, or whatever influence you have in the universe to the weather gods and insist on NO rain or wind, if you don’t mind.

I’ll be spending this week eating pasta, stretching, drinking water, peeing, drinking water, peeing and syncing my iPod. Saturday, Bill and I will drive down to the race Expo where, hopefully, I’ll get to meet Dean Karnazes (you know, Ultra-marathon Man). Of course, meeting Dean will be only one of hundreds of opportunities to feel inferior next week, but it will be worth it to get a real-life glimpse of his perfectly engineered physique.

I was reflecting on “physiques” this week and thinking about how the one thing you get to see at the back of the pack that you don’t get to see at the front is the variety in the human ass.

At the front of the pack you encounter only one kind of ass, really – the ass that is taut and muscular, that moves obediently in concert with the rest of the body. The gluteus maximus is fully engaged and flexed with each stride as the finishing touch after the calf muscles and the hamstrings have done their part. At the back of the pack we run differently and the renegade ass has a life of its own. The leg muscles do the work of moving the body forward and the job of the ass is to bounce, in its entirety, up and then down with each stride, so that the skin feels the impact.

From the back I have seen the behinds of many an interestingly shaped personage (and I can’t deny that my shape may be equally as unusual as some of those which have passed me, but, let’s be honest, there aren’t many runners on my tail). I have seen the wide, cellulite-laden bum, the flat but round rump, the breech of the well proportioned thick-stumped person, the bubble fanny, and the dangling duff, among others, all shoot ahead of me. At first I was alarmed by this. Should not fitness, size and proportion (or age, for that matter) bear some resemblance to one another, giving visual cues as to who should seed herself near the starting line and who should linger further back? Should not the skinny people move forward in the pack and the plumper ones meander behind? But this is not the case! Not only have I seen the larger variety of asses at the back, but the smaller and the lankier ones as well. Tall, elongated buns and tiny, compact tushes linger just in front of me near the back of the pack. What sense can be made of this?

By now, I have realized that shape and girth have almost nothing to do with speed and fitness level. We have been sold a bill of goods, taught to regard size as the measurement for, not only beauty, but health as well. As I plug along behind almost every imaginable variation of the human body in each race I run, I think, “Hogwash!” There is some other mysterious factor. Genetics? Training? Diet? Determination? I don’t know.

What I do know is that the longer I’ve been running, the greater admiration I have for the people who join me, some of them against their better judgment, no doubt, or against the jeers of friends or family who have said, “YOU, run a marathon? Ha!” Each ass that passes me has a story about how it got started and why it is doing this crazy thing we are all doing together – and yet alone. And those stories, when I get to hear them, inspire me to keep running. Usually people have emotional beginnings to their running careers. Usually, the meaning at our end of the race is not in the speed but in the completion and personal sense of victory (perhaps not unlike the asses at the front of the pack).

One more week until the Whidbey Island Marathon! One more week to get my ass in gear!