| The Underwear Affair |
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Less than two weeks before my forty-first birthday I discovered that there is indeed such a thing as “Old Man Strength.” According to www.urbandictionary.com, old man strength is “[u]sually acquired by men around the age of forty,” and “[i]t can be used to … prove to the younger crowd that you are not as old as they think you are.” I can pinpoint when my old man strength kicked in for the first time. It was June 6, 2009, during the final stretch of the Calgary Underwear Affair ten-kilometre run in Calgary, Alberta. Well, 2008 was not a lot of fun. It was a freezing-cold monsoon. Before the race even started my socks and shoes were completely soaked. Still, I gave it a good effort and came in twentieth out of 552 runners with a time of 46:52, which I was pretty sure was a personal best. The race’s “EXPOsed After Party” lasted only an hour because everyone was so cold they just wolfed down a burger, guzzled a quick beer, and then called it a saturated night. I hadn’t really planned on doing the race, or any other race, ever again, but a few months ago my sister told me to suck it up and once again raise some money for the cause, and I relented. With the help of generous donors, I raised a moderate amount of funds toward research for things like colorectal, ovarian, cervical, and testicular cancer. There are definitely things below the waist that I’m attached to, so I can see the value in preventing any tumors from taking root down there. I still had the memory of the monsoon from the year before when I awoke on the morning of June 6 to find snow on the ground. “This race hates me,” I said to myself. At least the entire before and after was going to be inside this year, and I’d only have to freeze for about forty-five minutes or so. The rest of the day, the weather tried to figure out what it was going to do with itself, but when my sister and I arrived for registration as part of Team Blackcat Bar and Grill (a lovely place where my sister is the manager), the snow had melted, the sun was out, and the temperature was struggling towards high single digits. While going through registration I noticed that the costumes were even wilder than the year before. I saw Leonidas and his Spartans, a group of tattooed women in corsets, some lady painted purple and dressed up like a bunch of grapes, and a lot of other outfits that were just way too much information. T-shirts and other apparel revealed team names such as the Colon Cowboys, Boxer Bandits, Butt-floss Babes, Nurses in Knickers, and one team name that I don’t think is appropriate for inclusion in this article. I’ve never been one for costumes, so I just pulled out a pair of silk boxers with hearts on them—a present from a Valentine’s Day long past—over top of my shorts. Even though I wasn’t a regular racer I didn’t want a costume getting in the way of a solid effort, and as gun time neared I made sure I was close to the start line. There was no gun, just a countdown and a whole lot of elbows. I took off with the leaders at a pace that was far quicker than I was used to and knew I couldn’t sustain. A few people quickly peeled away from the pack and established themselves as the leaders while I struggled to hold my position in what I figured was the top twenty. Being that I was a rookie racer it took almost a kilometre before I realized I had neglected to start my watch. At first the pace was killing me, but after about ten minutes my breathing started to normalize and I felt myself adapting. I could hear the guy in front of me rasping like he’d pulled an all-nighter with Cheech and Chong, so I decided to try passing him. I was paranoid about passing people because I didn’t want it to turn into some personal competition that would screw up my pace, but this guy didn’t take offense; by the sounds of things he had his own problems. At my watch’s fourteen-minute mark I saw a man check his watch and asked him what time he had. “Seventeen eleven,” he said. Cool. Now at least I could do some math and figure out my pace. There weren’t any markers, but there was a halfway turn around that would give me an idea of how I was doing. I was amazed when I saw the turning point and my watch time, plus the three minutes and eleven seconds, equaled only twenty-one minutes. I knew I’d been pushing hard and wondered if I had any hope of keeping it up for the back five. I grabbed some water to get rid of the sticky-mouth syndrome and almost choked on it, and then a young man in a U of C Medical School team shirt passed me. Over the next few kilometres med student guy and I traded places several times. Less than two kilometres from the end I was determined to keep my pace and finish in under forty-three minutes, but when I came up to a bridge underpass I ran into a potential problem: a family of Canada geese had laid claim to the path under the bridge and didn’t seem willing to let anyone pass. I knew that these creatures can be as protective of their young as a mama grizzly coming off a meth bender, but I’d be damned if they were going to stop me now. I ran as close to the railing as I could, avoiding the nasty hisses of one of the parents and hoping it wouldn’t beat the crap out me for threatening its brood, then made it clear. A short time later med school guy pulled up to me and we had a brief, gasping chat. “How much further?” he said. “Less than two klicks, I think.” I glanced at my watch. “I think we’ll make under forty-three minutes.” “Cool. Thanks.” “How old are you?” I asked him after another hundred metres, and he informed me that he was twenty-five. We ran another fifty metres. “So,” I said in an effort to spur some competition, “are you going to let a forty-year-old beat you?” He chuckled, but pushed the pace a little faster and I struggled to keep up. In the last half kilometre he pulled ahead and with only 100 metres to go he had a good thirty-metre lead. I was already on track for blowing away my personal best and having a good finish, but then the old man strength kicked in. I didn’t know I had anything left, but in my desire to beat the young fellow I broke into a sprint for the final stretch and passed the med student, whose name I later learned was Adam, and crossed the finish line in 42:13, taking thirteenth place out of 605 runners. The next day I hurt from the eyebrows down. I was such a wretched bag of poo that all I could do was sit on the couch, drink beer, and watch the Band of Brothers marathon on History Television while my lovely wife made fun of me. All in all, I became convinced that the phenomenon known as old man strength does exist. I also learned that it exacts a heavy toll.
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KCLAnderson (Karen) makes this comment
Thu 11 Jun 2009 23:06:04 PDT