Eight crazy things that happened at my Turkey Trot

In honor of this year’s rare convergence of Thanksgiving and the first day of Hanukkah—which, as every child raised in the Mountain West learned courtesy of Adam Sandler’s “Hanukkah Song,” lasts eight crazy nights—I have structured this Thanksgiving blog post around this sacred Jewish number. Think of it as a literary menorah. L’chaim!

1.) I won a pie. And in the process, I became enlightened to the immense motivational power of this hallowed circular pastry. Titles, medals, trophies, scholarship dollars—none of these even remotely compare to pie’s exceptional energizing quality. Every time I caught a glimpse of someone in front of me who could potentially stand in the way of me and my soft, buttery, flaky specimen of baked excellence, this was my thought process: She looks like she could be in my age group. Okay, her calves have wrinkles and she clearly reads every issue of AARP The Magazine cover-to-cover, but there is freaking pie on the line, and I’m not taking any chances. What if she’s like the female Benjamin Button? Beatrice Button, prepare to eat my dust. Then, a few minutes later: Hmmm...that’s either a 12-year-old boy with exquisite bone structure or Keira Knightley’s American doppelganger. Either way, I will not gamble with androgyny. Time to surge.

So worth it. 

2.) I embarrassed myself while receiving said pie. Usually, when the time comes for me to accept an award, I am able to reign in my excitement enough to create a façade of maturity and sportsmanship. But when the award is pie, I completely lose my shit. (Which, I’m told, makes other race participants uncomfortable. Whatever.)

Actual video footage of me when they announced that I had won a pie. (Source: i.minus.com)

3.) A dude in rubber foot-gloves beat me. Perhaps my only regret of the entire day was failing to out-sprint the foot-shaped-flipper-wearing asshole I spotted in front of me near the end of the race. But alas, with my pie secured, I simply did not give enough of a hoot to rally my fast-twitch muscles (or what’s left of them) for a kick-driven statement against minimalism.

4.) I was nearly outrun by a “13-year-old” girl. (The quotation marks indicate my doubt of said girl’s given age.) Why the suspicion? For one, I refuse to believe that my athletic prowess is comparable to that of a middle schooler—a high-schooler, sure, but definitely not someone who just got the official go-ahead from the Motion Picture Association of America to watch Dumb and Dumber.

The wrong kind of turkey trots. (Source: photobucket.com) 

But more than that, a recent workplace step-counting contest tainted my trust in the competitive integrity of my fellow humans. Just as one can attach a pedometer to a Fido’s collar for a few hours to pad one’s weekly step totals, one can enter oneself in a less competitive age division in order to increase one’s chances of securing a pie. (Believe me, my running partner and I spent considerable time contemplating whether we could pass for a couple of 45-year-olds.)

5.) I ran a 5K “PR.” (The quotation marks indicate my doubt of the race course’s advertised distance.) As much as I would like to believe that I ran a community Turkey Trot faster than any of my collegiate 5Ks, I am a realist. Pie may be an incredible motivator (see item 1), but it’s not powerful enough to revert my body back to a level of fitness I will never again achieve.

6.) During the race, I burned a number of calories that represented a mere fraction of what I would later consume, but I nevertheless justified my consumption of said calories with the completion of said race. Like a dieter who hits up Dairy Queen for a “reward” after 25 minutes on the elliptical—I broke a sweat, which means I had to have burned at least, like 5,000 calories, right? One large Snickers Blizzard with extra chocolate, please!—I reasoned that my 5K effort would cancel out all the gluttonous activity on the docket for the rest of the day.

Source: quickmeme.com 

7.) I solved all my problems—save for the one above—courtesy of the problem-solving station. Yes, this is actually a thing, which begs the question: Where was it during that whole congressional standoff fiasco?

We got 99 problems, but lack of pie ain't one. 

8.) I inadvertently shed my amateur status by offering my official endorsement of a commercial product. After the race, an Aquaphor rep offered my friends and me some free product samples on one condition: she had to take a photo of us holding them. So yeah, now that my celebrity is being used to market healing ointment, I am, by definition, a professional athlete. Eat your heart out, Mary Cain.

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

Paper boy

Recent trends in running fashion have left me worried that we are all slowly losing our identity as runners. (On a completely unrelated note, the recent upsurge of vehicles with Alberta license plates in my hometown has left me worried that we are slowly being invaded by Canada.)

The more we “borrow” gear items previously designated for sports that are not running, the more we look like athletes who are not runners.

“That’s hogwash!” you might say.

But before you write off my concern as irrational paranoia, consider the following evidence.

Women running in skirts originally intended for playing tennis:

People running in rubber foot-gloves originally intended for yacht racing:

Dudes running in calf warmers originally intended for Jane Fonda:

If that’s not enough to totally freak you out, get this: legendary running coach Alberto Salazar recently revealed that he is asking some of his athletes—namely Olympic silver medalist Galen Rupp and high school national recordholder Mary Cain—to wear equestrian shoulder braces while training.

Yep, you read that correctly—equestrian. As in horse riding. Because duh, small people who sit on top of horses that run have a lot in common with small people who run like horses.

When I read this story, I couldn’t help but imagine poor Galen decked out in all of the crazy gear that is surely lurking in his closet. How ridiculous would he look?!?

Well, thanks to my rudimentary Photoshop skills and a slightly embarrassing amount of free time, we don’t have to imagine anymore. Below you will find my most recent exploit in a string of non-revenue producing ventures. I call it Paper Galen—soon to be the number-one toy among kid marathoners everywhere! (So far this only includes the Welsch sisters, but I have a feeling America is on the cusp of a youth running craze.)

Super Runday

This past Sunday, I—like many Americans—tuned my TV to one of the most anticipated sporting events of the year. I am of course referring to the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix.

In a sly move aimed at preserving as much advertising revenue as possible, ESPN2 elected not to broadcast the meet live on Saturday night, as it would have blocked a valuable time slot from much more lucrative programming options like masters water polo or competitive cup stacking. (I didn’t make that up—cup stacking really is a Thing and ESPN really televises it.)

I wish I had been a fly on the wall in the ESPN programming meeting where the Grand Prix scheduling decision was made. I imagine it went something like this:

SCHEDULE BOSS GUY: Ted, when should we play that Boston indoor track meet?

TED: Uh, I dunno, Boss. I guess we could just play it live. There’s nothing else going on that night.

SCHEDULE BOSS GUY: Wrong! If you don’t learn anything else from me, Ted, at least remember this: never put track and field in a time slot that has even the slightest possibility of drawing an audience. Saturday night is prime airtime for losers with no girlfriends, injured construction workers with no girlfriends, and fantasy geeks with no girlfriends whose Dungeons & Dragons game is on hiatus until the Dungeon Master recovers from the flu. It’s ratings gold just waiting to be mined!

TED: Oh, OK. So what would you put in the Saturday night slot?

SCHEDULE BOSS GUY: I don’t know, maybe competitive cup stacking—you know, something with broad appeal and moderate entertainment value.

TED: But what about the track meet? We’ve got to put it somewhere.

SCHEDULE BOSS GUY: Think about it, Ted. What’s the one day of the year when we have nothing to lose—when we know for certain that the entire country will collectively not give a crap about what’s on second-tier sports channels?

TED: Umm…Super Bowl Sunday?

SCHEDULE BOSS GUY: Very good, Ted. You’re catching on quickly. So, since we have pretty much no chance of attracting any sort of TV audience on that particular day, we might as well play something that nobody would watch anyway. Something like…

TED: Track and field!

SCHEDULE BOSS GUY: Excellent, Ted! You’re the man.

TED: No, Boss—you’re the man!

SCHEDULE BOSS GUY: I know.

What Ted and his boss didn’t account for, however, is the fact that there are literally tens of former track athletes out there just waiting for an opportunity to watch their beloved sport on the small screen. Usually this means sneaking into the living room in the wee hours of the morning to catch a condensed replay of a weeks-old college meet on some obscure sports network.

So when I see a TV listing for a track meet that is going to play on ESPN2 during normal waking hours, I get pretty flippin’ excited—even if it is Super Bowl Sunday.

Sure, I grew up in a football family that treated Super Bowl Sunday like a sacred religious holiday. But was there really any harm in skipping a bit of the redundant pre-game “fluff” to get my track and field fix?

Boy, was I glad I tuned in. Not only did Mary Cain—the 16-year-old running phenom from New York—shatter the high school two-mile record by SEVENTEEN FREAKING SECONDS, but also the camera crew managed to catch would-be 800-meter winner Phoebe Wright hawking a giant loogie on the track as she took her position on the starting line. (In case you were wondering, spitting on an indoor track is generally frowned upon. Vomiting, however, is totally permissible because come on, how are you going to stop that?)

Also, I will readily admit to giggling like a 6-year-old girl when men’s 3,000-meter competitor Dejen Gebremeskel, completely oblivious to the fact that he was being filmed at the starting line, did a not-so-subtle pick-and-flick before running to a third-place finish.

The logical explanation for their lack of manners: they’re not used to being on TV, and when they are, the only people watching are hotel night auditors and insomniacs who are just trying to find some yawn-inducing television until the Lunesta kicks in. Oh yeah, and pathetic track and field has-beens.

UPDATE: It has just come to my attention that the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix allegedly was broadcast live on ESPN3, an online streaming service loosely affiliated with ESPN. According to my research, access to this particular channel is heavily restricted by a series of complex subscription regulations imposed on the vast majority of digital cable providers. A recent survey of cable users revealed that ESPN3 is available in approximately 17 homes nationwide. However, since this figure falls within the margin of error associated with the survey, it is quite possible that ESPN3—like Manti Te’o’s girlfriend—is nothing more than an elaborate Internet hoax.