Day 63: Nipple Chafing

So far the re-re-re-rededication to the training process had been going well this past week. I missed the front end of my first week back, naturally, but since Wednesday I had been right on top of that, Rose. On Saturday, I was meant to do a 12 mile long run, the first high mileage day since I limped home for 4 miles after hurting my leg on the 9-mile disaster. Long Island was in the midst of a particularly bad heat wave. Well, perhaps not technically a heat wave, this being mid-August, but it felt like the entirety of the Island was being held tightly in Chunk from The Goonies sweaty palm. I was leaving for Disney in three days with my BFFL Carla, and I know that the Mouse House isn't likely to leave much time for running. I thought I would try something different: Wake up early to be the heat, head to a near-by High School track and pack some Gatorades and water to leave in the shade.

Logistics of the long-run has become my biggest concern of late. I'm not into the phase where I'm out on the streets for two, three, four hours-plus. How do you pee? Okay, got that. How do you poop? What if it storms? Who dabs your forehead with a towel? Where do you get a drink? Much like Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club (RIP John Hughes), I have a really low tolerance for dehydration (and it's gross, sir). These questions weren't going to get answered today, so the track it was. Furthermore, as seemingly boring as a 12-mile run around a track seems, there was something appealing to the internal countdown of having to do exactly 48 laps.

I knew this wasn't going to go well, when I woke up at 10 am. I'm not a late sleeper in general (one of the pitfalls of your late twenties - starting to feel like your "wasting the whole day" by sleeping into the double digits), but I guess my brain wanted to give my body an excuse to be lazy. Thanks, stupid brain.

I woke up and had half a cliff bar and a glass of orange juice, before I realized that I had no idea where the high school in my town was located. I'm a recent transplant to the strange, scary world of Suffolk County, where sidewalks and street lamps are few and far between. So apparently were high schools. The only one I knew of was Ward-Melville High School about 15 minutes away (Shout Out: Herr Boys) so I headed there. As I parked and started walking over to through the construction riddled parking lot, I saw a tiny woman walking back from the fence with her head shaking. Crap. If this track was for some reason closed, that would be all I needed to throw this training day in the garbage. I had gotten to the point where I wasn't so much looking for excuses, I was looking for ways to avoid them, because once they reared their heads I would embrace them like my buddy Anton embraces Asian chicks.

I don't know what that woman was shaking her head about, but it wasn't the track - I found the gate, dropped off my things in a shady spot, did my stretch and started my laps. I could go off onto a long, bitter tangent about my Nike + iPod chip that needed recalibration and I wanted to smash it into a million pieces then grind it up into fine bits and serve it as a garnish on top of Steve Jobs' salad. But I won't.

Instead, I'll admit to only getting half way through the run. I started at about 10:30 am, and by the sixth mile I felt that I was going to slip and fall in one of my own pools of sweat. However, this is something that I could've persevered through. I think. At about mile 3 I was inflicted by the weird and painful phenomenon nipple chafing. Now, I know what you're thinking: That is something they made up as a way to get a cheap laugh out of Andy Bernard's bloody nipples on The Office. Well, if that's not what you were thinking, it's definitely what I was thinking. Until I felt that first scratch of my man nips against my Under Armour.

"That's funny," I thought to myself, as I gently scratched my chest through my shirt. By the next mile, I was in full on chafing mode, with every thrust of my body slamming my shirt against my sensitive irritated nipples like a marble inside a burlap sack. It was the most odd and intense and uncomfortable pain I've ever felt. I literally felt as though my nipples were going to fall right off, and by this point, it was something I would've welcomed. There must have been some high school hooligans hanging out at the track the night before because there were a couple of broken beer bottles laying around the periphery of the track, and I actually was wondering if I should slice off my nips in some kind of beastly mock-Hostel self mutilation. I'd be like that person who had convinced himself that his body was crawling with ants and peeled off his own skin, but shouts: "I got them all!"

By the sixth mile, the combination of the nipple chafing and the heat was too much for me. Plus, there was a family of three generations of runners on the track now and it was making the nipple chafing seem like a fine price to pay to not see them anymore. You might call me a quitter, but I don't care. To paraphrase Monica Gellar Bing: I got chafed. Chafed bad.

The Breakdown of the Day:


The Workout:

6 miles / 12 minutes per mile / 772 calories


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