Crap People Don't Tell You About Running: #3

So I tripped and fell again yesterday—if you look closely, you can see evidence of my scraped up hands in the sweaty and seriously unflattering photo at right (yes, I sometimes rest my sunglasses atop my baseball cap; no, my hands aren't actually bigger than my head).

This time it was Lady Sovereign's Love Me or Hate Me playing in my ear when I fell, and mere seconds before my tumble, I was wondering if the fact that today's play list included Eminem and Lady Sovereign back-to-back meant I had somehow been catapulted from nerdy to hip.

A trip, a dive, a roll and the answer was a very clear "no."

But while hipper seems desperately out of the reach of graceless, old me, faster is a word I can get behind. I ran my 3 mile run in 29:44, a time that included precious seconds wasted on

• tripping,
• rolling on to the sidewalk,
  
• getting back up,
  
• brushing off the dust,
  
• taking a moment to thank the gods of running (Marathon?) that I'd managed to avoid the pile of dog shit close to where I rolled into the grass, and obsessively checking my body to make sure I had in fact avoided the dog shit—I had.

Given that daydreaming while distracted by music may just turn me into the first runner in history to develop callouses on her palms as a direct result of marathon training, you'd think I might consider the relative health merits of running in silence, but no way. I'd sooner be the wacko in Winthrop who runs in a crash helmet than give up my tunes.

But I would like to pose a sponsorship challenge—I hereby found the consolation contribution. If you want to be a consolation contributor, just visit my sponsorship page and donate $10 for every fall I take. We're starting at $20, but I feel I should warn you that there's no upper bound.

And so without further ado, today's crappy thing people don't tell you about running is this: Careless and clumsy runners will get to know road rash intimately. And often, apparently.



Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.