What's the nastiest thing anyone has said about your running? (Read 1566 times)

I know I'm not the most graceful looking runner. One time years ago when I was setting out on one of my long runs I passed a couple high school kids and one of them yelled 'Run Forrest, run!' It actually made me kind of chuckle. When I ran the Marine Corps Marathon in 2000 my sister ran the last ten miles with me. By then I wasn't feeling so great. I remember somewhere around mile 23 telling her how much I appreciated her running it with me and she said "well, you're not going that fast so it's no big deal." Not exactly the motivation I was hoping for.

They didn't actually say anything, but the mean ol' garbage men mocked my so called running style. I had only been running for about 3 months, so my style was "make it home alive". Now I breeze by and we do the nod.

I don't know if this is the nastiest thing ever said, but I was told by a coworker when I was 18 or 19 that running was a male form of anorexia. (The woman that said it was a wee bit overweight, herself.) So, I had to prove I wasn't anorexic, so I convinced her to take me out to lunch one day so I could prove it. A full appetizer, a full lunch plate, plus I finished what was left over on her plate and on another woman that went to lunch with us, at least a few thousand calories. She never tried to tell me I was anorexic again, after that. I wonder how much that cost her?

The nastiest thing I've actually heard (of) while running but which wasn't directed at me was in Albany NY. A couple kids drove by on a cool down and yelled, "Yeah, you better run N*****!" at my teammate who happens to be a very tall, very strong, very fast, and very black man. It didn't go well for the kid that yelled it. They got stopped at a light and my teammate chased them down and pulled the kid through the open window and threw him on the hood. He didn't actually hurt anything but the kid's pride, although the pants needed washing from what I'm told. That happened the year before I got to college. The year after I got to college we got a "Run Forrest Run" remark while I was running with him and got treated to something similar. He didn't pull the kid out of the car but he caught up to it and grabbed the kid through the window. (Yet another reason to wear a seat belt, I guess.) He just yelled and scared the kid and asked why he thought it was funny to yell at and harass runners. I think he just liked scaring white teenagers.

I carried a $50 bill in my pocket for months after that. If I ever saw the kid I was going to say, hang with me for an hour and it's yours.

What a great idea for getting a training partner for a day! (Well, part of a run, anyway...) Heheh.

Julia, we had a running joke among some of us who were running a similar pace at a marathon last winter, at an out-and-back part, about "look at all those wimps over there, coming back so fast because they just can't last as long as us"

The coach who oversees the tempo and track runs i do twice a week ... a group was doing hill workouts combined with ladder intervals around the track. A friend and I decided to do straight speed work on the track instead of the hill workouts. As we were working as hard as we could in the midst of an 800 meter interval, the coach came by and shouted to us "People jogging need to move out of the way of those doing speed work!" We are fortunately used to her (she really means to be nice but just isn't very good at it) and just laughed (when we finished "jogging" as hard as we could and had extra oxygen for laughing).