johnsjar

I was pointed to this ad campaign from Adidas that I’d never seen before (yah, I live in a closet). Then one of my blogging/running friends, Lisa Lawrence, posted THIS.

You can see the whole series HERE.

It’s a great set of pictures and I love them all but this is what I want to comment on:

For those of you who aren’t runners and don’t know what’s going on, the man is taping his nipples. He is doing this because during long runs your shirt usually rubs them raw to the point where they start bleeding. It’s really quite painful but you often don’t notice it until you see red streaks staining your shirt, or after when the race is over. Very sensitive stuff. The tape prevents this from happening for obvious reasons.

As for me, I don’t really relish the prospect of ripping tape off my nipples, taking chest hairs with it. So what I do (and I don’t have a whole lot of chest hair to begin with) is shave them, THEN put the tape on. I’ve had bleeding nipples before and trust me, this is the easiest way to deal with it and still wear a shirt. Of course, you would look pretty silly with two little bald patches around your nipples so you really shave it all off.

And while we are on the topic of weird bodily problems runners have why not mention other areas that get abraded? I mean, you can walk all day and nothing happens but when you run endurance events or are training for them, bits of your body come off. Especially if it is at all warm outside. You’ll see runners slather all kinds of goop on themselves before a run, whether it is white zinc oxide baby grease, or the more sophisticated and expensive “Body Glide”. If you don’t, you end up missing huge chunks of your skin because of abrasion not only between skin and clothes, but skin and skin too. I CAN tell you how painful it is to develop such an abrasion rash in your nether regions because your inner thighs are rubbing together. It’s not something you want to deal with when you’ve still got a half dozen km left to go.

I won’t even talk about your naughty bits, except to say that not only is it possible to get painful rashes on them, but it’s also possible to have them almost frostbitten. Don’t laugh. Or I’ll kill you.

Do you think that long distance runners somehow mysteriously turn off their bodily secretion functions when they run? They don’t, although your body tries to shut down those functions and it succeeds to a limited extent. Watch a long distance cross country race one day why don’t you? Only position yourself a km or two after the start in the first secluded area you find. It’s really quite funny when you see every third runner suddenly veer off the trail into the bush for no apparent reason.

I’m a runner, and yah, I’m different…