One for the birds

I love baby animals. And if you don’t, well then, you’re a heartless asshole.

That being said, I realize that not everyone cares about baby animals as intensely as I do. Some people prefer to focus their attention on other, similarly important things like war and disease and human starvation.

Perhaps you tear up when you see one of those Christian Children’s Fund commercials—as well you should, because they are very, very sad. But nothing tugs at my heart strings more than those Sarah McLachlan animal cruelty commercials, which I cannot bear to watch for fear of developing a serious drinking problem. Whenever one comes on, I instinctively close my eyes, cover my ears, and sputter out sentence fragments like a Tourette’s patient until I can locate the remote and change the channel.

Now that you have a bit of context, I’ll get on with my story. It all started a few days ago when my friend Kim and I headed out for a run on a particularly breezy afternoon. The sidewalk was covered with windblown leaves, fallen branches, gum wrappers, flimsy Dairy Queen napkins, Taylor Swift concert tickets, and other worthless bits of debris.

As we turned onto the main road, I caught a scurrying blip in the far left corner of my peripheral vision. Upon closer examination, I realized that it had tiny legs. And a tiny beak. And tiny wings. I gasped in horror as my brain caught up to my eyes. It was a baby bird—an itsy-bitsy panic-stricken ball of fluff trying desperately to jump over the curb so he could make his way back to the tree from which he had fallen.

He was obviously too young to be out of the nest, and my heart broke as I watched him fail—over and over again—to scale the towering curb. Every few steps, his tiny bird feet lost their footing, sending him crashing into a precious little heap of yellow fuzz. It was the most pitiful thing you could ever watch—besides, I’m told, The Hangover Part III.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that all of his efforts were in vain—that he would never be able to climb the tree and rejoin his little bird brothers and little bird sisters in their happy little bird home. (Also, I don’t speak bird.)

I stared pleadingly at Kim. The look of distress in her eyes matched my own. What could we do? If we left him to fend for himself, he would die—either from starvation or by the heavy paw of a feline predator. If we tried to rescue him, he would die. (Anyone who’s anyone knows that a mama bird will reject any offspring tainted by human scent!)

We paused for several moments and debated what to do.

“What should we dooooooo?!?” I whined.

“I don’t know, what do you think we should do?!?” Kim squealed back.

“I asked you first!” I retorted.

“Ooooohhh…look at him—he so cute!” She said.

“We can’t just leave him—he’ll starve or get eaten!” I wailed.

“I know, but what can we do?” Kim replied. “If we touch him, his parents will smell us on him and reject him anyway.”

“Well, we could put him in a box and raise him ourselves,” I reasoned.

“But what would we feed him?” she asked.

“Well, we could, like, chew up worms and spoon-feed it to him with tweezers,” I suggested.

I could tell from the disgusted look on Kim’s face that she was not down with my worm-mash idea. In fact, she probably thought I was a huge freak for even saying it out loud.

At this point, I knew I had to put a lid on the conversation before I word-vomited any more repulsive comments. I lamented the poor bird’s fate one last time before restarting my watch and resuming the run. I felt a pang of guilt, like I’d just witnessed a pedestrian hit-and-run and was now fleeing the scene of the accident as the victim lay in the street, bleeding profusely and clutching a broken femur.

I tried not to let on, but the truth was that for the remainder of the run, my mind was consumed by the memory of that poor baby bird. The look of sheer terror in his beady little eyes haunted my every thought. But there really wasn’t anything I could have done, right? RIGHT???

As much as I wanted to believe my own words of consolation, I could not shake the feeling that I was, in some yet-to-be-identified way, a miserable failure. There was only one way to settle this—to free my mind of its guilt-wrought shackles: consulting The Google.

The all-knowing power of The Google never ceases to amaze me. I am especially mystified by its crazy-accurate psychic powers. Like, I can type the word “If,” and it will autocomplete the exact question I was thinking: “If I had 7,856 nickels, how much money would that be?” (Answer: $392.80)

So, I brought up The Google and began typing “Can I,” and of course “touch a baby bird” popped right up in the search field. (I wish I could marry you, Google. You just get me.)

I hit enter, picked the most legit-looking search result, and cupped my hand over my mouth in disbelief as my worst fears were confirmed.

To put it lightly, whoever told you that mama birds will reject their human-scented babies—your mother, your babysitter, your kindergarten teacher, that guy Steve from Blue’s Clues—was a dirty liar. Because guess what? It’s A MYTH! The Internet SAID SO!

I probably would have spent a lot more time being upset and angry about this revelation had it not occurred as a result of stumbling upon the coolest fun-fact website of all time. And thanks to my adult-onset ADD, the whole baby bird fiasco quickly faded into the annals of history as I clicked my way through a series of incredibly-entertaining-but-ultimately-useless trivia items. Well, useless to a normal person anyway. As a rambling blogger with adult-onset ADD and a horribly disjointed writing structure, I know just how to use them—as my concluding paragraph!

So, here you go: Chickens have earlobes. Chickens with white earlobes lay white eggs, whereas chickens with red earlobes lay brown eggs. In an average NFL football game there are only about 12 minutes of actual play time. Nine-banded armadillos always give birth to identical quadruplets. Cashews are related to poison ivy. “Pepsi-Cola” is an anagram for “Episcopal,” which some people believe the drink was named after. “Britney Spears” is an anagram for “Presbyterians,” which no one believes she was named after. The end.

The perfect predicament

My college coach always taught her athletes to focus on the positive qualities of each racing experience. In her eyes, a bad race was, if nothing else, a valuable learning opportunity. Over the years, this approach to race evaluation has yielded many important lessons: Fudging your entry time is not always a good idea. Pop-Tarts are not an appropriate pre-race meal. Official lap-counters cannot always be trusted.

A couple of weeks ago, I raced a 5K in Arizona and learned that there is, in fact, such thing as a “perfect” race—one that does not require any sort of post-race effort to identify the “positives,” because the entire affair is, from start to finish, one big, sweaty bundle of positivity.

Last weekend, exactly seven days after my perfect 5K, I decided to push my luck by entering another race. Considering that the second race occurred in Montana and was double the distance of the first one, I’m not really sure what I was thinking; I can only surmise that the thin mountain air compromised my brain function, severely impairing my ability to think logically. I mean, honestly, what are the chances of hitting the jackpot two weekends in a row?

“Slim to none,” you might say.

Somewhere between the freezing temperatures, icy wind, high altitude and aggressively long hills, “slim” got thrown out the frost-covered window. Before I even finished my warm-up, I knew there was exactly “none” chance of repeating the flawless race experience I had achieved just one week prior.

And…I was right. I know, I know, this story would be so much cooler if I told you that through the power of positive thinking and sheer determination, I was able to overcome the odds and pull out another perfect race in spite of decidedly imperfect conditions—or, at the very least, that I found five dollars. But alas, unlike Mary Cain—who can expect a perfect race pretty much every time she toes a starting line—I am human. (And in this economy, people are much more careful with their five-dollar bills.)

The problem, I have realized, is that once you find perfection, it is very difficult to replicate. Now that I know what perfect is, no other race will ever measure up. This is at once immensely satisfying and immensely depressing—like getting a surprise upgrade to business class only to have every subsequent flight for the rest of your life ruined by the memory of fully reclining seats, excess legroom and complimentary cocktails.

Similarly, even though I ended up winning the 10K outright by nearly six minutes, I did not feel entirely fulfilled. There was that lingering feeling that it could have been better—if it had been warmer, if the wind had been calmer, if the course had been flatter, if I’d had more competition, blah, blah, blah…

Not to mention that my prize as the overall female winner was a pair of size 9.5-11 athletic socks. But hey, let’s focus on the positive: I’m sure they’ll come in handy somewhere down the road—if I unexpectedly turn into an exceptionally large man, for example.

And now, because I just couldn’t resist, here is a crude artistic rendering of myself as an exceptionally large man:

The real Brooke Hogan

Against the wind

In the romantic, fairy tale version of spring, virtuosic bluebirds usher in sunny skies and cherry blossoms as the snow melts away, leaving behind pristine meadows of green grass and wildflowers. In the real world, spring slowly chips away at Old Man Winter’s icy grip on the landscape in a sloppy transition marked by cesspools of slush and mud. The drawn-out battle between warmth and cold often results in unpleasant weather conditions. Chief among them: wind, and lots of it.

You might think that an excessively sweaty person like myself would appreciate the cooling and drying effects of a nice, steady wind. Wrong. I hate the wind. I hate the way it interrupts my breathing, I hate the way it whistles past my ears, and I especially hate the way it frizzes out my hair. (Come on, I already look like I spend my days poking fingers into electrical sockets and rubbing my head on balloons.)

When I am forced to race in the wind, I usually calm my anger and anxiety by pretending that with each swing of my arms, I am actually punching the wind in the face and stomach. My running form inevitably suffers as I attempt to vary my technique to include jabs, hooks and uppercuts. So while I’m out on the track visualizing a bout with Mike Tyson, my competitors are zooming past me and wondering why I haven’t been locked up in the loony bin. But I digress…

After a particularly gusty run this week, I came up with the following set of guidelines to make running in the wind a more enjoyable—and less humiliating—experience.

1.) Avoid out-and-back routes: If you start out against the wind, you’ll be tempted to cut out early because running into a headwind seriously blows (pun intended). Conversely, if you begin with the wind at your back, you’ll run too fast and too far. On the way back, you’ll probably give up and attempt to thumb a ride home, which sets you up to get kidnapped by Mexican druglords. Running with a side wind is a potentially less dangerous option, but beware of arctic winds from the north—they could leave you with a feeling of numbness on one side of your body, a symptom that could be easily misinterpreted as the onset of a stroke.

2.) Fasten loose hair securely: The only thing more annoying than listening to Willow Smith sing about whipping her hair back and forth is having your ponytail repeatedly smacked against your face by 35-mile-an-hour wind gusts. It’s a good day for a bun. Or a skullcap.

3.) Wear eye protection: Under normal circumstances, I would argue that running in sunglasses makes you look like a tool. But with swirling clouds of debris flying through the air, would you rather (a.) endure painful surgery to remove the flecks of gravel and tiny shards of glass that are lodged in your cornea, or (b.) look like a d-bag for 45 minutes?

4.) Leave your running skirt at home: This should really be an everyday rule, but it’s especially important that you resist the urge to wear this ridiculous piece of running attire on a blustery day. This is not the time or place for you to recreate your own Marilyn Monroe moment. It’s a wardrobe malfunction just waiting to happen, and, if you like running in parks frequented by young children, a surefire way to earn a profile on familywatchdog.org.

I hope you have found this guide useful. Happy spring running, or if you live in Montana, happy extended-winter running. (That Punxutawney Phil is really full of it, isn’t he?)