It's pretty common for cross country runners. I've been enveloped in smell of vomit when I walked through the football practice facility, and I've heard my best friend's slurs after her basketball conditioning workouts. The word in the power lifting community confirms that most women lifters wear a pee pad, but the involuntary grunt and the occasional fart seem to be the only bodily malfunctions for throwers.
Luckily, no one else has to see all that. They don’t have to practice through the smell of regurgitated dining hall hot dogs, or translate their friend’s slurs into words from the English vocabulary. They don’t have to search for a bathroom before a competition, or fight to keep their eyes open through that night class. Instead, they’ll label athletes “lazy” for finally giving in to those heavy eyelids, and call another “stupid” for mispronouncing a word from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
But it isn't that simple. Take it from me; I peed my pants.
I’d be lying if I said we weren't privileged. Between early registration and top of the line Nike dri-fit apparel, the school was as much in our palms as the “Track and Field” stitching was to our gear. We knew we would never get closed out of housing, and the athletic academic support lab was the only place in the Captial District with free printing. We carried around folders full of papers that could excuse us from any class, and the staff upstairs washed, dried, and delivered our laundry by tomorrow’s practice. Not to mention, we had a fridge in the locker room.
Yeah, we were privileged, but we were exhausted.
On my third cup of coffee by 9am, I jogged around the track to get ready for practice, with a 7am workout in the books and fifty pages of Thoreau’s Walden already escaping my memory. Or did Emerson write that one? Usually one cup is enough to get me through my 4am reads, but today’s chapter was about huckleberries, so one just wasn't cutting it. I hope there’s no quiz. Because practice falls smack in the middle of most class times, I had to register for a class from seven to ten at night, which follows two other classes, a team meeting, and this practice. Wednesdays are tough. At the risk of sounding like a complainer, I have to admit that when my 4am alarm goes off tomorrow for my scheduled reading of nineteenth century American literature, I’ll say that Thursdays are tougher.
I sit next to Erin in that class. Our outfits are similar, but her basketball dri-fit is accompanied by a Monster, while my Track and Field apparel coordinates with a large black coffee. Our typical greeting is followed by updates on the day’s practices, including physical ailments, all discussed with a smile. As Professor Bernard starts to ramble about the 19th century gossip between Emerson, Theorau, and Hawthorne, Erin takes out a package of rice cakes and a jar of peanut butter, and I pull out a mason jar stuffed with oatmeal saturated with Muscle Milk. The Mr. Feeny of SUNY Albany stops the lesson, and the class goes silent except for the sound of Erin spooning the peanut butter out of the Skippy’s container, and my struggle to scoop the last oat from the bottom of the jar with the fork I found beneath the clothes and sneakers in my backpack.
“Am I interrupting dinner?” Feeny stood over us. Erin and I looked at each other with our mouths full. Would it be rude to say yes?
This was normal. The constant rushing between practice and class, the empty bottles of dry shampoo weighing down our backpacks, and the four-dollar cups of caffeine were not products of exhaustion, poor hygiene, or malnutrition; they were parts of Wednesday. They were also parts of Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. They were normal.
I didn't think much of it, until I peed my pants.
My incident wasn't a waterfall escaping my Nike Pro spandex, or a scene that anyone else even noticed, but it was a moment in which I had lost complete control over my body. It was a moment in which I had given myself to the sport at a level I didn't know was possible. It overtook me. In retrospect, the sport had overtaken me not only in that moment, but in every moment I spent slaving over technique; it had tucked me in every late night, and woke me up every early morning. It handed me back failing reading quizzes, and it fed me from a mason jar.
It also handed me an identity I wouldn't have traded for the world. It took a chance on the athlete I wanted to be, and granted me a facility, a squad, and a life that could make that possible. It handed my opportunity in a seven-foot aluminum spear, and it fueled me with failures.
But it was a weird moment. It was in that moment I realized just how much of myself I had given to Track and Field, and just how much I had earned my privileges- especially a new pair of spandex.
