Get in my belly.....

One of my favorite old Monty Python sketches is the one where the inhumanly fat guy goes into the restaurant and proceeds to eat a small buffet of food before announcing to the maitre d’, “Get me a bucket, I got to puke.” And then he pukes. Everywhere. On himself, on the table, on the maitre d’, on the other diners. He fills the bucket…and the floor...and people are slipping and sliding all over it. I am laughing so hard I'm practically vomiting. It's so sick and so funny. The entire restaurant is covered in green and brown vomit. Yes, I find things like this funny. I also chuckle during eye surgery shows on the Discovery Channel. Watching a cornea get owned is hilarious!

Last night I went out to The Melting Pot with my good friend Jeanine and I ate like the inhumanly fat guy. I literally devoured a 5 coarse meal. I feel a little like this fat guy this week. I can't run yet and I’ve been consuming M&M's like they’re amphetamines at a Grateful Dead concert. Probably some time next week, I’ll get back into the regular schedule of running, crunching, and push-upping but post race I like to see just how close I can get to a cholesterol induced heart attack. I was talking with my friends recently about running and weight. It’s true, most of the top marathoners are pretty svelte. They could double as broomsticks. Carrying less weight around while toting your body for 26.2 miles certainly would seem to be easier than carrying more weight. I read all of the time that the main reason some folks run is simply so they can eat whatever they want without gaining weight. True. But you could also eat whatever you want as a bulimic without nearly the same amount of effort. So, being “in shape”, which roughly equates to “being faster”, must mean something to you. I take note of the folks passing me in a race. I’d like to think that everyone is in tip top shape…no extra flab anywhere…cut abs…long, strong limbs. But, you know what? Many of them pretty much look like regular people you pass on the way out of Burger King. They might have a little belly. They might be tall and skinny…short and round...horizontal and parallelogram. They definitely have a smug "Look How Fast I Am" sneer projecting through the back of their head because they’re jerks for being faster than me. If they don’t need to crunch abs to exhaustion and dine on vegetables and gagalicious protein shakes to pull off a 2.17 half marathon, then why should I? I’d love to see a study of race times and human weight to see the improvement as the pounds are dropped (all other variables – including training effort – remaining the same). I’m sure it’s been done. If it hasn’t, I now own the idea and you scientist’s will need to pay me for it. If it has, then, why didn’t you tell me before I wrote this ridiculous post? The way I see it, if you want to maximize your race time potential, you do what you can, as a regular human runner, to balance eating healthy and training as hard as you can within the time you have. If your weight decreases and, finally, stabilizes at a certain level and you’d have to take extra, extreme measures to continue losing (think cheese grater to the abdomen), you’ve probably hit that point where you need to ask yourself if it’s worth the additional sacrifice. This is my normal, human runner race weight. You may as well look to your training now to maximize your speed. I’m not kidding...people 50 pounds heavier than me zip by me in a race. I doubt they’re thinking “Boy, if only I lost a few, I could really fly by that bubble butted little chic even faster.” No, this will have to do. I’m not getting lipo or cutting off body parts. I’ll just train a little harder if I want to be faster. For now, though, keep the bucket handy and the small, whole-chicken-resembling babies away from me. Anything I can reach that reasonably smells like food goes in my pie hole. Don’t look now but I spy a Twizzler lying innocently on my desk. Or is it my ink pen? We’ll soon find out…Happy trails.