Posted by John
The wife ran in and completed the Country Music Half Marathon last weekend, defying the odds, Mother Nature, and her own genetics in the process. It was quite the accomplishment and I’m very proud of her because history certainly wasn’t on her side; I mean, this is the same girl who got bursitis of the hip that put her on the disabled list for like 8 years after running a 5k.
As the dutiful husband I got up at the crack of dark to drive her to the starting line of the race then met up with a buddy at a convenient interchange in the course to set up shop and watch all the runners go by. Now, I can say from experience that a marathon is not a spectator sport. Not by a long shot. Just imagine watching 30,000 people lumbering past you in various states of pain ranging from mild discomfort to Abu-Ghraib-like-torture whilst voluntarily running either 13.1 or 26.2 miles. I don’t consider myself a lazy dude but you couldn’t force me to run 13.1 miles so there’s no way I would voluntarily do it.
“Your best friend is dying of starvation; if you don’t run 13.1 miles to deliver this food to him he will die.”
“Wait. Hold on a minute. You’re telling me that if I don’t run 13.1 miles to deliver this Happy Meal to my best buddy he will die? Is that what I understand you’re saying to me?... Wow, I was not expecting this when I got out of bed this morning. Man, this is a real head-trip. I mean, on the one hand it’s my best buddy, you know? But on he other hand, it’s 13.1 miles. That’s pretty far…”
Since a marathon is a spectator sport like suicide bombing is a good retirement plan, the only way to truly enjoy it is to get yourself set up with some fold out chairs, some snacks, and a few bloody mary’s and really get settled in. Once you’ve done that it’s hard to imagine anything that isn’t made better by a solid bloody mary. Bridesmaid dress shopping? Yeah, I could get through that with a bloody mary. A Tea Party rally? Ok, bloody mary me. Childbirth? Make it a double bloody mary.
I can tell you who doesn’t appreciate a nice bloody mary the morning of a marathon – a marathon runner. The number of looks of absolute contempt and disdain we got from runners passing by was inconceivable. Look, dick, you’re the one that chose to do this to yourself this morning, just like I chose to fix myself a delicious bloody mary, so if you want to be upset about this you have only yourself to blame. Now get your stinky, sweaty ass back to jogging because you’re really cramping my bloody mary here.
As proud as I am of the wife for her accomplishment she definitely has her work cut out for her for the next half marathon. There are some positively insane runners out there that really take this stuff seriously. I mean, she did awesome but she still lost to a woman with one leg, two jugglers, and a woman in a wheelchair. That really blew my mind. There was actually a woman competing in a wheelchair. That’s amazing. Especially when you consider the topography of Nashville and how hilly the racecourse is. Then again if you think about it, what goes up must come down, so she was coasting for like half the race. I mean, I’m not saying it’s unfair, I’m just saying.
One thing I was absolutely unprepared for when it came to a marathon race was the bloody nipples. I’m not kidding. Apparently chaffing is so bad for some dudes that their nipples actually start to bleed. You should have seen the look on my face the first time I saw that shit run by. It was like the first time I ever saw the movie Seven, like, “What the fuck was that? Did I just see what I thought I saw?” The thing about it is, in general on a day-to-day basis I don’t give my nipples any thought at all. Really I could take them or leave them, you know? So if you present me with an opportunity in which my nipples go from being less than an afterthought to perhaps the most demanding thought in my head as they are bleeding down the front of my chest, I don’t care what that activity is, I will not participate in it. Ever.
It did however prompt my buddy and I to come up with a new marathon-watching drink – the bloody nipple mary. It’s just a slight tweak to the he traditional bloody mary, but much more apropos for a marathon race day.
This is a tough segue now but try to stick with me here – do you ever remember as a kid watching the GI Joe cartoons and the public service announcements they’d have at the end of every show? For instance, there would be two kids riding their bikes down a desolate road when they come across a downed power line that is sparking all over the place, hopping from one side of the road to the next, and the two kids think they can jump their bikes over the power line until out of nowhere Roadblock, the GI Joe, shows up and gives the kids a lesson about how you should avoid downed power lines and call the proper authorities to handle the situation. Then all the PSA’s ended the same way with the kids being like, “Thanks GI Joe, now we know!” and the Joe would respond, “And knowing is half he battle!” There were literally dozens of these PSA’s at the end of Joe cartoons.
The thing is, as far back as that was I remember almost all of them. I’d like to think that Snow Job1 didn’t need to tell me not to skate out onto a frozen pond in the middle of some field somewhere, but obviously I remember that PSA so who’s to say which lessons I learned from life and which from the Joe’s. All I know is, the PSA’s were pretty effective at delivering a message.
The only downside to the GI Joe lessons was, as a young, impressionable, stupid kid, you could find yourself in a lot of trouble if every time you were about to do something retarded but didn’t have the fortitude of character to recognize it as retarded at the time, you expected a GI Joe to come along and stop you from doing said retarded act. For instance, the time when the older kids in the neighborhood set a board up on a couple of bricks as a ramp at the bottom of a steep hill and started jumping off it on their bicycles. If I wasn’t a complete imbecile at the time I would have recognized that I was at least 2 years younger than all the other kids and the act of jumping my little BMX bike over a DIY ramp made out of some bricks and plywood at the bottom of a massive hill was in fact retarded. As it were, I wasn’t winning any IQ pageants back then so right about the time the bicycle and I were several feet above the ground and the bicycle had dislodged itself from my feet, ass, and hands and my body was slowly leveling out parallel to and about 5 feet above the pavement, I distinctly remember the thought entering my head, “Now would be a good time for Swift Kick to come along and save my retarded ass from colliding with the asphalt here in a few seconds.” As it were, Swift Kick was nowhere to be found so as I laid there on the cold, hard ground, broken and bleeding while all the other kids scattered to get the fuck away from the scene of the crime, I distinctly remember the thought entering my head, “Well, it would have been really fucking awesome if the Joe’s had done a Public Service Announcement about this situation sometime in the past few years because knowing how retarded this was ahead of time would have been way more than half the battle.”
Anyway, the only reason I bring this up is because my buddy had seen a bunch of clips on the internet where these guys had taken the old GI Joe PSA’s and overdubbed them with different voices to completely change the meaning of the PSA, thereby making them pants-shitting hilarious. One in particular featured a couple kids who were cooking in the kitchen when the parents weren’t home and set the place on fire until Blowtorch came in to rescue them. Of course, the spoof of that clip is quite a bit different and the punch line has to do with Pork Chop Sandwiches. So my buddy happened to be wearing his “Pork Chop Sandwiches” shirt while we were drinking bloody mary’s and spectating at the marathon this past weekend and you would not believe the number of people that ran by and where like, “Hell yeah! Pork Chop Sandwiches!” It was amazing. Like there you are, in the middle of a goddamn 13 mile run and you see some random dude in a shirt that says “Pork Chop Sandwiches,” and it compels you to yell out at him like that’s the best thing you’ve seen in weeks. Well, you’d think that’s crazy until you actually see the clip, then you realize how hilarious it is:
In fact, you should do yourself the favor of watching all of them. Some kind of suck, but by and large they’re pretty hilarious. And of course, pretty inappropriate.
1. Wow, I swear I did not make that name up and I swear until just now I did not give much thought to the double entendre of this or any of the other Joe nicknames. Skidmark? Yeah, that was a real Joe too.
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