Farting etiquette

I made a deal with myself that I was going to openly and honestly discuss any and all running issues that I encountered while training. Today, I want to address the elephant in the room. I want to talk about the real issue, the one problem that no other running blogger has the guts to address:

Farting while running.

That's what it feels like...

We've all heard the myths and legends about people who do yoga for the first time. These stories all follow the same basic principles - someone attends a class, stretches their body in a new way, and lets rip unexpectedly. This happens because the muscles are stretched and squeezed in ways they haven't been bent before and trapped air is forced to travel through the body. All that air only has one place to escape, leading to classrooms of new yoga students dropping stinky presents every night of the week.

I always thought that story was restricted purely to yoga. Then it started happening to me.

It seems to happen around the same point in my run. By the third or fourth mile, pressure starts to build in my stomach. I can feel it coming from a long way off. After a few moments of discomfort, it finally happens. Every step I take pushes another gust out - and it's never quiet. There is no such thing as a 'silent but deadly' on the road. Everything is loud and proud. It sounds like a bent trumpet playing along in my wake, each step hitting a different note. It feels like an extra boost of speed, a butt-powered wind machine blasting me along the course.

That usually happens fairly early into my run. After that, I get random and unpredictable bursts of bottom-assisted speed boots until the run is over. They tend to strike without warning. Luckily I'm always well past the scene of the crime before anything can happen.

When this happens on the road, it's totally fine. There's usually nobody around, and if there is, I can always keep moving until it's safe to unpack a stinky botty biscuit. When it happens at the gym, however, that's a different story.

What do you do when you're on the treadmill in a crowded room and you feel the familiar clench in the pit of your stomach? You know what's about to happen. You know you're about to unleash an unholy drum solo. There's nothing you can do. You can't even pretend it wasn't you.

The only thing you can do is crank up your music and pray that nobody will hear you shredding the low bass note over their own headphones. If you aren't wearing headphones, try and keep up with the beat of whatever music is currently playing in the gym. And if there's no music... well, you'll have to find a new gym. You can never go back.

This is all well and good in training, but what happens on the day? What if I start farting like a derranged wilderbeast during the marathon? Will everyone else be dropping eggs like I do when we run through London? Will we unleash toxic gasses on the poor spectators around the three to four mile marker, enveloping the crowd in a cloud of brown stink? What happens if I run past a BBC cameraman and the viewers at home hear my bum playing the tuba? Does this happen every year? Is farting while running the unspoken horror of the marathon?


These are the kinds of questions that keep me up late at night.