Some tips for beginning runners on yucky bodily functions…

Today’s 11 km run brought to light something rarely spoken of. Getting to know your body is a long process that takes years, especially if you are middle aged or older and you have not been taking care of yourself. It takes years to get reacquainted with muscles you’ve never thought about or used since your healthy youth if at all. But also there are other internal matters which you must become aware of too. You are forced to come to terms with all the little intimate bodily functions that you never have to think about in your normal daily sedentary life. Things like going to the bathroom so you aren’t forced to do it during a training run. Things like getting up early enough before a run to have a bowel movement so that you are not caught somewhere around km 7 and having to grit your teeth because you can’t take a dump in the middle of the street and you’ve got 4 km left to the nearest bathroom.

Sounds rather awkward and no one likes to talk about it, but these are things you WILL be thinking about. Very uncomfortable if you are caught in such a situation, and we ARE all human are we not? We all have to go but no one likes to talk about it.

Which brings me back to my point about getting to know your body again. Many people don’t get enough fiber to have regular bowel movements or predictable ones anyway. So to get healthier, prevent cancer and all kinds of other problems, you have to increase your fiber intake to healthy levels. Easier said than done in today’s fast food society. The best way is to use a high fiber cereal, or a psyllium fiber additive on a daily basis unless you are capable of preparing and eating a ton of vegetables a day. Increasing your fiber intake to healthy levels is essential but must be done with care and very gradually.

In my case I have cereal in the morning (not always before the run) and I found it worked well but I am experimenting with adding a bit more fiber later in the day, spreading it out through the day. I began having an extra helping just before bed, but now I am thinking I should have it a couple hours before so that my bowel movement is triggered soon after I wake up rather than an hour and a half after, in the middle of a run. The alternative is to get up at least two hours before my run, but since I am getting up at 5 AM and running at 6 AM to beat the heat, I would have to get up at 4 AM and that is not going to happen.

The other interesting thing you might find out about is that certain foods or eating habits might give you just enough gas to keep your diaphragm from expanding enough to breathe easily. Once you begin running and shaking up your digestive system, you burp, releasing the gas and letting your diaphragm expand to its normal capacity. This is also not a usual occurrence but it is something not often talked about or thought about, possibly because it is a yucky body function thing…

While I am on the topic of diaphragms, beginning runners might be interested in knowing about a phenomenon called “getting your second wind”. There is lots of research on that, so I’ll just say in a nutshell that it mostly means your diaphragm has just warmed up and is now able to relax and expand a lot more than when you were warming up.

Having said all that, I have to add that having to go in the middle of a run is even now an extremely rare occurrence, but I had to point out that it is a problem sometimes, especially for the benefit of beginning runners who think that getting in shape by running is easy. It takes much more than merely making your legs move faster down the road. You have an entire body complete with natural cycles and biochemistry to think about.