Walk This Way

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Wednesday - October 01, 2008

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I’m pretty proud to say that I participated in the Nike 5K For Kids run the other week. Well, I didn’t exactly run it, but my wife and 11-year-old daughter seemed to enjoy watching me walk the walk. For what I went through, I could have been in the Ironman Triathalon and enjoyed it more.

While it was a beautiful morning, I started perspiring as soon as we passed the starting line. By the time I reached the halfway point of the 5K, my clothes were sticking to my body like Krazy Glue. That was when from behind us we heard a familiar voice.

It was a teacher from our daughter’s parochial school. She participates every year and she brings her pet rabbit, which she pushes along in a baby stroller. I know what you’re thinking as comparisons to the story of the tortoise and the hare might be unavoidable in my case.

However, this is not what my experience was about. In spinning around to acknowledge the teacher, I managed to give myself a self-induced wedgie. This was not your typical wedgie, but because of the then clinging nature of my underwear, this became the mother of all wedgies.

I resumed the walk and attempted to dislodge it without the use of my hands. I started to take really long strides at the end of which I bounced up into the air and slammed both my feet onto the pavement. No luck. With each forward movement the wedgie seemed to get more intense.

I was totally consumed by it and it became like an itch that I couldn’t scratch, only worse. Because I was too embarrassed to let my wife and daughter know what was going on, let alone all the people around us, I suffered in silence.

With a third of the run left to do, I resorted to walking like a bow-legged cowboy in the hopes that the wedgie would work itself out. My wife stopped in her tracks and exclaimed, “What the heck are you doing?”

I explained what happened, and while the two of them laughed, my wife asked why I didn’t “clear it” myself. I said I wasn’t about to pick my butt in front of more than 9,000 people. That’s when my daughter, in all of her 11-year-old wisdom, cited the battle cry of the run’s sponsor, “Dad, ‘Just Do It!’”