Boston Marathon Week 5 of 18: Not the greatest of weeks...

The one advantage of evening long runs through Golden Gate Park:
Seeing the Conservatory of Flowers lit up for the Summer of Love

Not a great week for me, guys. I had a couple of solid workouts but that's pretty much all I can say. Things were going just fine until Tuesday morning when I was rear-ended on the way to work. I was driving in the far left lane at normal freeway speed when some dude slammed into me at what must have been 90-100mph without even trying to stop. My car skidded all over the road and I was just lucky I was able to keep it from slamming into the freeway divider or careening into the other lane & getting hit again.

Have You Mocked A Lady Today?

I'm sure you've heard by now about the cancer patient recently mocked by SELF Magazine for running the LA Marathon in a tutu.

The tutus were made by her company, the proceeds of which were donated to Girls on the Run, for the record.

If you've read this post, you can probably guess my feelings on this matter. (And if you haven't, you might take a look -- it's one of my most favorite things I've ever written.) My brain was putting together the skeleton of the angry six-page blog post I would no doubt write on the subject when I came across Caitlin's post at Fit & Feminist. It turns out that she said pretty much everything I would have & more, AND did it in, like, two pages, which, the way I see it, is a win for all of us.

I highly recommend clicking through to read the whole thing, but there were a few passages in particular that really resonated with me that I wanted to highlight:

"[I]t doesn’t escape my notice that the race gear deemed most mock-worthy – running tutus, running skirts, pink and purple gear, flowers and sparkles – are almost always things that are overwhelmingly embraced by women. It’s like there is this refusal to take a woman seriously as a runner and an athlete unless she presents herself in clothes that are similar to those worn by guys. Running skirts and dresses are prissy, gear with pink and flowers encourages women to be less assertive, women who wear makeup to the gym are insecure...the criticism seems to be endless, but the end message is clear: that things normally thought of as feminine are inherently frivolous, silly and stupid. It’s basically textbook femmephobia.

WORD, Caitlin. Internet fist-bump.

Are there legitimate questions about the female apologetic (see also this) & the pinkification of all things lady-related (don't tell me you've missed the pink BodyGlide they charge you more for)? Of course there are. And we should absolutely continue to discuss them in a constructive, supportive way. But there's a huge difference between asking thoughtful questions respectfully in appropriate forums & straight-up publicly mocking someone for doing something that made them happy & hurt no one.

Once more, for the record: If you need to insult, mock, or make disparaging remarks about how other women dress for their run/exercise, you are doing it wrong. You can have your opinion. You can make judgements. Think or feel whatever you like in your sweet little heart. But don't inflict it on the rest of us.

How To Not Be An Asshole: Urban Running

Before I lived in an actual city, it never occurred to me that running on a sidewalk in a perfectly nice part of town in the middle of the day could potentially be dangerous. But it can. Hazards abound. Ass-hattery is commonplace.

It would be one thing if these hazards were unavoidable (in the same way that, say, bad weather is unavoidable). But they aren't. They are by & large a result of people failing to pay attention to their surroundings and/or take into account how their actions affect other people who are also trying to use the sidewalk.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am not like one of the Tour de France fan boys who ride their bikes on the Golden Gate Bridge walkway at 40 mph & yell at pedestrians to get out of their way like they are somehow entitled to use it as a training course & how *dare* anyone inconvenience them for the half a second it takes them to jump out of the way. When I'm running in crowded parts of the city (usually unavoidable, since I live in one of them), I do my best to pay attention to who is doing what around me and accommodate other people as much as I can, and most of the time the other people around me are lovely, and everything works out fine.

But at other times, some people will insist on making this INCREDIBLY difficult. Let us count the ways.

Friends, I give you: A Full Taxonomy of Urban Sidewalk Douche-Baggery.

Cyclists

I know many thoughtful, law-abiding cyclists. This section is not about them. This section is more about the ass hat minority that seem to lack basic common sense or courtesy for their fellow citizens or both.

If you are over the age of 13, you should never be riding a bike on the sidewalk. Period. In fact, in many areas in San Francisco no one should be riding a bike on the sidewalk. The Valencia Corridor, for example. Yes, it's technically legal for kids, but use some judgment, here, parents. Hipsters are congregating. Activists are activating. Artisinal coffee is being lined up for. Somebody is going to get hurt. I have been three times hit head-on by a cyclist and two of those times, it's because the (adult) cyclist was riding on the sidewalk. Two feet from the bike lane.

I hate you. We all do, actually.

If you're on a bike path that pedestrians share (ie, The Panhandle), a) stay in the right lane, b) use a bell / your voice to warn pedestrians that you're coming up behind them, and c) use a light in the dark. The third time I was hit by a bike, it was because the cyclist was weaving in and out of both lanes in the dark with no light. I tried to get out of her way & it was like she followed me, off the path, right into the grass. There was blood.

Dog Walkers

Again, responsible law-abiding dog walkers, I am not railing at you.

But GODDAMN. There is a limit to how many dogs one person can safely walk on a sidewalk at one time.

Extreeeeeeeeme dog walking!!!!

Livin' la vida loca!!!

Look, People Walking All Teh Dogs: I can't go around you. And neither can anyone else. This sidewalk ain't big enough for the 14 of us.

Extreme dog walking has become such a big problem in San Francisco that we've actually passed a law about it. Look what you made us do.

And it's not just the extremists that cause problems. Urban runners, I'm sure you've met This Guy:

There are places where it's reasonably safe to have your dog on a 30 foot leash. Like in a dog park, or a large open area. But on a busy urban sidewalk, this situation is going to play out one of two ways: 1) Despite my best efforts to navigate it, I trip over your seven hundred foot long leash and go crashing to the pavement, or 2) Your dog decides between my feet looks like a GREAT direction to go and one of us gets brutally kicked in the face. (I am not saying who but one of us is a LOT bigger than the other & wearing shoes.) I have lost count of the number of times this has happened.

I also love how too-long-leash guy is always like, "Oh, sorry! Sorry! Sorry!" Forget your sorries, dude. Sorry doesn't bandage up the bloody spots. Apology NOT accepted.

Children

Children are all brain-damaged. You can tell this because they will see a fast-moving object coming directly at them & just stare at it. I get that; I taught school for eight years. In & of itself, this isn't really a problem. As long as there aren't too many hipsters waiting for coffee or clipboard-wielding Sierra Club members, I can probably just move a foot or so to one side. The trouble is that the all-time favorite activity of children (as far as I can tell) is to move with blinding speed in *completely* unpredictable directions. Sometimes it is like they are actually trying to block your path, while also effecting complete & total obliviousness to your existence. I think I have only actually ever knocked over one small child, but this is only due to preternatural agility & significant gymnastics background on my part.

Look, this ain't suburbia. Busy urban sidewalks are not the place for free-range children. If your child is at or below the brain-damaged age, maybe put them on a leash (not 700 feet long) or in a back pack or in one of those wheeled cart-things. Or, I dunno, pay attention to where they are & what they're doing. That works too.

Yes.

Yes.

Double yes.

Not good very bad abort abort
(You have to imagine the seven hipsters & three Sierra Club ladies.)

Besties

Friendship is just awesome. This is my opinion at all times *except* when I am running alone on a busy urban sidewalk. Then, ooooh, I hate friendship SO EFFING MUCH. So. Much. Because this:

What is your damage?? I know you see me because we made eye contact. I know you know I am moving in your direction. I assume you are capable of comparing the width of the sidewalk to the width of your group. I also assume you don't think I can quantum tunnel through you and/or your besties or collapse all the particles in my body so as to slip through the four-inch gap between you guys and the nearby stoop / storefront / artisan coffee line / gaping whole in the ground.

Don't get me wrong; I love living in the city, but some days it is almost enough to make you move to the 'burbs & scout out some nice, safe fire trails.

I Say Something

I've noticed a theme recently with many of my pursuits of choice, and that theme seems to be "Things that should be fun and awesome, but kind of aren't lately." I don't really want to get into the details of all of that (at least not now), but that's where my head was as I began excitedly tracking my friends in Boston Monday morning. *Finally*, I was thinking, something that can just be fun and uncomplicated.

So much for that.

I never know what to say in situations like this. Scratch that; I never know what to say in any emotionally charged moment. It is something I genuinely suck at in life. Because I'm pretty sure anything I possibly say or do will be wrong, or trite, or maudlin, or come across as fake-sounding, and because saying something because you feel obligated to rather than because you feel impelled to still seems kind of un-genuine to me. I'm a firm believer that, contrary to popular belief, the world does not always need more voices.

I have had a few friends go through personal tragedies in this past year, though, & some advice one of them shared with me is that in a tragedy, saying nothing is not a neutral response. Saying something, no matter how badly you screw it up, is always better. So here's something.

I am going to skip all the platitudes that have already been repeated so many times you probably have them memorized; obviously I am thinking them because who isn't, but you don't need to read them in yet *another* blog post (although statistically speaking I'm sure I'm repeating someone).

Every time I hear of one more bombing, one more shooting, one more human-initiated tragedy, it's like a punch to the gut out of nowhere. It makes me feel like throwing up because there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I mean yes, there are some things I can do very indirectly and long-term and at great remove, but there is nothing I personally can do ahead of time to stop any specific incident. There are people in the world whose job it is to do the best they can at that, but they are not infallible.

It's the helplessness that gets me. A flash of that sick, punched-in-the-gut feeling, a rush of adrenaline and panic if I happened to know anyone thereabouts, and then having confirmed their safety, numbness. Because I have a finite well of emotional energy, and at a certain point the emotional part of me learned the hard way the consequences of depleting it. You never know how much you're going to need.

The other feeling I get in response to tragedies of human violence is anger. The icy, focused, rational type of anger. Because, in addition to stealing lives and physical, mental, and emotional health in myriad different ways, people who perpetrate those acts steal something else as well--the fundamental sense of safety and well-being that people should be able to have when they go somewhere like a sporting event or a movie theater or their school. While deaths and injuries and psychological trauma will of course affect those who lived through it in ways unimaginable to most of us, that lost sense of security and safety and predictability of the world is incredibly damaging in the long-term and shakes everyone who hears about it. If it could happen there, why not here? If it happened then, why not tomorrow or next week? Why not my school? My movie theater? The high-profile sporting event I attended?

Third, I have a request. I would encourage people not to refer to acts of violence like what happened as Boston as "senseless" and "meaningless." Humans voluntarily perpetrating violence is not a matter of rolling dice or spinning a wheel. Humans have free will and choice and motivation. It wasn't an accident. Someone or some group chose to do this for a reason. They had a purpose, even if that purpose was only to hurt people or cause chaos. When we refer to violence and crime and "senseless" and "meaningless," we surrender what control we do have over these situations and abdicate our responsibility to do what we can to prevent them. And we do have some control. Not a huge amount, necessarily, and most likely a confluence of many small, indirect measures brought together. But we need to face these situations by saying, "This was an event, and an event has a cause, and causes can be discovered and studied and understood." We prevent terrible events by finding & understanding their causes. Which means admitting the causes exist, that they have a logic behind them that we can learn to understand, not pretending they don't exist by labeling tragic events as "senseless" and "illogical."

Finally, for those of you who are tempted to give up on humanity altogether when something like this happens (which is kind of an understandable impulse), I want to share with you a few things I learned yesterday evening from Don, who works at Twitter. I saw a quote today from an executive there that echoes more or less what he said to me last night, which was that Monday afternoon really exemplified the service at its best and worst.

On the one hand, you had people tweeting racial accusations and epithets, conspiracy theories, and any number of fake / made up stories, on top of the usual onslaught of premature conclusions and proto-news that will probably always be one of the cons of being able to share information so quickly now.

On the other hand, the positive response was overwhelming. Their system was inundated with tweets from people willing to house and assist lost and stranded runners, restaurants offering to feed them for free, and information from government offices and other organizations about how to locate friends, families, & loved ones. Sometimes it is greatly, greatly reassuring to see what human beings are still willing to do for strangers in times of tragedy and need.

I am staying quiet on the issue of responding until we know more about who is responsible and what their motivations were for this horrific crime. It's easy to make assumptions about why someone would do this, but at this point we don't know. In the mean time, take a quiet moment today to think about those who were injured or killed, and their families & loved ones. They are the ones who deserve our attention and thoughts right now, not the perpetrators.

With Great Power...

...comes great responsibility. I like to remind myself of this fact every time I write a blog post. And by "great power," I mean the power I have to look/sound like a complete idiot/asshole/moron/some other flavor of undesirable to strangers by writing things on the internet. Earlier today I wrote a bitchy/moany/whiney post, then re-read it this evening & deleted it because *I* found it annoying and that is never a good sign. You're welcome, future self.

Instead, I just have some Things to share. (I am not blogger-chic/-trendy enough to choose a number that starts with the same phoneme as the day of the week, so apologies for that. Frankly, I'm not totally clear on what day of the week it even is right now, so maybe it's just as well.) I will warn you ahead of time that they might not have much of a "thesis" or "point" or "basic coherency" or any of those other mainstream fancy pants writin' conventions that the Elitist Establishment is always pushing. That's life sometimes. Or blogging. Or whatever.

1) First, on the off chance that you don't read this girl's blog, then OMG you really must start. While I enjoy reading many, many blogs for a myriad of different reasons, I read Shelby's mainly because it never fails to crack me right the hell up and there aren't too many blogs that I find legitimately, consistently hilarious in a way that comes across as completely genuine and natural. Seriously. This is the case even when it's not a "funny" post. (Also she is a baddass of a runner.)

Today (or at least sometime recently) she wrote a post called "Two Things I Don't Get," and as I read it I found myself nodding in enthusiastic agreement and having that "OH THANK GOD IT'S NOT JUST ME" moment of relief you have when you really just can't believe it's just you, but no one else is saying anything, and you don't want to say anything either because you don't want to sound like an asshole. According to my calculations, though, even if people think that Shelby is an asshole for writing it out loud and I am an asshole for agreeing with her out loud, then the total asshole-perception is divided equally between the two of us, so people will think that each of us is only half as much of an asshole as they would have thought we were otherwise. And that is better.

(Update - About a billion people have now left comments on Shelby's post being like OMG ME TOO THANK YOU FOR SAYING THIS, so the way I figure, each of our total perceived assholery is given by the equation A_p = (A_t/n) where A_p = how much the blogosphere perceives any one person to be an asshole for saying these things out loud, A_t = how much the blogosphere would think ONE person was an asshole for saying them, and n is the total number of people who say or agree with them. Fields Medal, please.)

Get it? It's a dust buster, which sucks? The amount of effort I put into finding this image is about equivalent to how pleasant my runs have been lately.

2) The title of my original whiney/bitchy post was going to be "This Week Sucks." (Subtle, no?) But then I remembered that as a denizen of the run-blogging world, I should take special care never to be too negative lest I discourage and depress others. Yet I also hear that I should be careful never to get TOO sunshine-and-unicorns about my running when it is going well, because that is apparently equally off-putting and not gritty and "real" enough, and people have totally stopped reading blogs over it. Obviously I work *extremely* hard to ensure that my blog has precisely the right balance of peppy, enthusiastic posts to gritty, "real" ones, and I feared that one entitled "This Week Sucks" may have been a bridge too far in one direction.

But for reals, y'all, this week sucks. I haven't had a good run since my track workout Tuesday a week & a half ago. Ever since then I've been completely exhausted, super low on stamina (ie, the last couple miles of a six mile easy run feels like the last miles of a marathon), or dealing with some kind of physical pain significant enough to harsh my mellow. And that's when I've been able to run at all.

Part of this I'm sure was jumping from ~20 mpw to nearly 40 in one week. Part of it has probably been not sleeping enough. Part of it is also probably that I keep forgetting that Sparring Night at the dojo (ie, advanced practitioners from a variety of martial disciplines show up & fight for two hours) is more or less equivalent to a hard 10K in terms of the physical wear & tear on my body. I'm pretty sure I've lost about 20 potential miles to that alone. On the other hand, my sparring is not great and I have a freaking black belt test somewhere in the not-too-dim-&-misty future, so you know. Trade-offs.

But still. I've been bummed that I can't run as much/well as I've wanted too lately & that takes its toll on my mood.

3.Once upon a time there was a run-blogger who was like, "What's up with all the BLACK running tights? Is this is a freaking FUNERAL? An East Coast social event? Why is that the ONLY color of running tights that anyone ever wears?" Then she got super bold & ordered a pair of slate gray running tights & thought they were SUPER cool.

Then she went for a run in them & finally understood why people pretty much only ever wear black running tights.

I took a picture. Then I chickened out & decided I don't have the guts to post said picture on the internet. (See opening line above.) So I deleted it. Let's just say that there is a sweating issue that happens and there is a certain pattern to it and it is not pretty in a color where you can actually see it.

It kind of reminded me of that time that group of dude cyclists went with the red shorts. Not because of all the genitals, but more because it reminded me to appreciate the general forgivingness / camouflage properties of black when it comes to spandex.

I'm sorry. Or you're welcome. Or y'know. Whatever.

No Words.

I just learned this morning that a nine-year-old Alabama girl recently died after being forced to run for three hours as punishment for having lied to her grandmother about eating candy bars. The cause of death was severe dehydration & hyponatremia.

This is an absolutely horrible story under any circumstances, but it made me a little extra sick because it reminded me of something I saw at the track last fall, another little girl about the same age being forced to run as a punishment.

What the hell is wrong with people?

The Most Disturbing Thing I've Ever Seen at the Track. Period.

This is probably the most serious post I've ever written. I'm still a bit shaken, not to mention sick to my stomach, as I'm writing it.

Tuesdays are speed days for me so I went out to Kezar Stadium to run 8 x 800s. I had a really fantastic workout in spite of only taking one day off after my epic 16 miler and a few lingering pains here & there. All of that seems totally irrelevant, though, next to what I had to watch and listen to while I did it.

In spite of the overcast & drizzly weather, there were a reasonable number of other folks out on the track. About halfway through my two-mile warm up, I kept thinking I could hear someone crying. When I stopped for my dynamic warm-up, I realized where the crying was coming from. A little girl, maybe nine or ten, was jogging down the straightaway towards me with her dad. She was the one crying. And I don't mean kind of weeping a little; outright sobbing.

Here's what I heard as they approached and passed:

Dad: "What's the perimeter?"
Girl (through choked sobs): "The perimeter--the perimeter is--it's the outside...the outside of something."
Dad (angrily): "No."
Girl: "I don't remember!"
Dad: "It's the same thing I told you the last time around. The perimeter is the shortest distance around the outside of a shape. You find it by adding up the total lengths of the sides."
Girl: (more choked sobs)
Dad: "Now. What's the perimeter?"
Girl: "The perimeter--the perimeter--is the distance around the shape..."
Dad: "No. I guess we're going to run some more."
Girl (racked with sobs): "Nooo..."
Dad: "We're going to run until you get it right."

I listened to variations on this conversation for literally half my workout.

"Now. What's the perimeter?"
"It's--it's how far around the outside..."
"Are you sure? Maybe we need to run another lap."
(still sobbing) "Nooo...I can't...I can't run anymore..."
"Then you better get it right."

I must have watched them run at least eight laps this way, and they were out there running when I arrived. I could hear her crying even from the opposite side of the track, and it made my skin crawl.

"Alright. What's the perimeter?"
"The perimeter is the distance--it's how far on the outsides--"
"Nope. Guess we're going to keep running."
(sobbing) "No, please! Please let me stop!"
"We can stop any time you want. All you have to do is get it right."

After twenty minutes or so of this they moved onto the infield and started jogging laps around the football field.

"What's area?"
(Again, through choked sobs.) "How much is inside. Can we stop now?"
"Not until you get it right. Area is the amount of space contained within a figure. You find it by multiplying the base times the height. What's area?"
"Area is the--it's how much space is inside."
"No. Guess we're going to run some more."
(More abject sobbing)

Later when she started to fall behind...

"You better run, girl, or we're going to be out here even longer."

And after that, still running...

"I guess you better study hard next time, huh? And if you don't, then guess what? We're going to come back out to the track and run in the rain some more. Won't that be fun?"

Finally--finally--they stopped running. The girl followed her dad out of the stadium, limping, still sobbing near-hysterically. As they left...

"This isn't going to get any easier, you know. Do you think I'm always going to be there to help you with everything?"

I'm still at a loss about the whole situation. Partly because this man (who is clearly the biggest ass-wipe / leading candidate for Dick-Father of the Year on the planet) somehow managed to take two of my greatest loves, math and running, and turn them into some horrific two-pronged instrument of torture (and probably cause his daughter to develop a life-long hatred of both). Partly because he may have been causing her physical harm in addition to what seems like a pretty hefty dose of psychological & emotional harm. Partly because I didn't know what to say or do about the situation while it was happening, or what I should do, or could do. I don't even know who they were. I kind of felt sick to my stomach throughout most of what should've been a really fantastic run. I have a vague memory of seeing a father & daughter of a similar age running on the track together in the past, which makes me wonder if this is a regular thing.

What would you do? How far can you go in terms of confronting parents about the way they're (mis)treating their children, particularly when you don't have any parenting experience? Is this abuse? Is there even the slightest possibility that I've somehow misunderstood / misinterpreted the whole situation?

I need a drink.

Running, Clothes, & Sexual Harassment

"Another run in the city, another bout of sexual harassment."

This was my facebook status sometime around a year ago or so. It could easily be my status once or twice a week when the weather is warm. It could be my status so often that I'm almost used to it.

Almost.

It was one of the hardest things to orient myself to when I first moved to San Francisco. Prior to that I had lived on the SF Peninsula, kind of off the beaten track, and did most of my running through a canyon that ran behind my place, on one of the many breath-taking trails nearby, or on a gym treadmill. I had never once been the victim of cat-calling or sexual comments while running.

In response to my facebook status, a few non-San Francisco-dwellers (and a few who are) responded incredulously, "Really? In San Francisco?" Yes; in San Francisco. Apparently being somewhat progressive and enlightened overall doesn't necessarily extend to how we treat women we don't know.

The first couple of times it happened, it shook me up a bit. After it happened enough times to form a pattern, I started changing the route that I ran to avoid areas where it seemed to happen more often than others. This didn't really change much. It turns out that if you run more than five miles at a time in a city that's barely seven by seven square, sooner or later you're bound to run into ignorant men who are more than happy to objectify you.

The one redeeming factor about SF in this respect is the weather. When I decide what to wear for a run, I decide roughly 10% based on what is clean, 5% based on what doesn't clash, and 85% based on what will be comfortable. Even in the summer, even in the middle of the day, it doesn't get particularly hot all that often, so there are plenty of days when I'm perfectly comfortable running in shorts and a T-shirt (and a fair share of colder, windier ones when tights are called for). But if it's above 70 and sunny, I know from experience that by the time I'm 2 miles into my run I'll be utterly miserable if I'm wearing more than shorts and a sports bra, so that's what I'm going to wear. I don't think that's unreasonable. I think I should have the right to do this without being accosted by strangers and becoming the target of lewd remarks.

The comments range from the reasonably benign (marriage proposals, honking, kissing noises, loud incitements to "work it, baby!," requests for my phone number, etc.) to the slightly troubling (comments about specific parts of my body, warnings not to "run that sweet ass off,") to the sincerely distressing (requests for sexual favors, descriptions of what the harasser would like to do to me, comments about my clothes that include words like "bitch," "slut," "hoe," etc.). Some of them are the kinds of things I could shrug off easily if they weren't part of a larger pattern. Some of them really aren't.

(I feel like I want to take a moment to drive home the point that I am NOT in any way offering these incidents as evidence of my hotness or attractiveness. I think that sometimes when a woman mentions being sexually harassed, her complaints are dismissed because people interpret them as a way for her to draw attention to her physical appearances without seeming conceited -- "Oh, woe is me, men think I'm SOOO hot, they just won't leave me alone!" That's not what this is. Anyone who's studied it will tell you that ALL kinds of women face sexual harassment, not just those who meet certain societal beauty conventions, and not just those who wear skimpy clothes. This is about something that makes it really hard for me to enjoy one of my favorite activities and leaves me feeling like I want to crawl into a hole after.)

I've discussed it with a lot of different people and gotten a lot of different responses. They've included:

• Advice: I shouldn't let it bother me because "men are men" and this is all natural, normal behavior that men can't help engaging in when they see a woman they find attractive for whatever reason.
  Why it's bullshit: I don't buy this because I am a firm believer that, while we might not always be able to control our thoughts and feelings, we can ALL control our actions and the words that come out of our mouths, and we all have the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others and consider how our words and actions affect them. I think that this logic discredits all the wonderful, amazing men I know who are 100% capable of controlling their words and behaviors, no matter how attractive they find someone.
  
  
• Advice: I should take it as a compliment (hey, at least guys notice you!).
  Why it's bullshit: I can't see the logic in taking as a compliment a comment that reduces me to my body / how I look. Honestly, I have a feeling that these guys who find me attractive enough to make sexual comments about find me so mostly because of the amount of skin they can see, and would treat most women in the same outfit the same way. And if I was in the same outfit and they didn't find me attractive for whatever reason, something tells me I'd just end up the object of comments intended to make me feel bad about myself.
  
  
• Advice: I should enjoy it while it lasts. In particular, this is advice I've gotten from a couple of women in their 40s or 50s; they remind me that there will come a day when no one is interested in objectifying or harassing me, and I will miss it and find it affirming on the few occasions when it does happen.
  Why it's bullshit: First, it's very, very difficult for me imagine this is true. (Do they also expect me to believe that there will come a day when I miss strange men grabbing my ass in crowded bars?) Second, how I may or may not feel about something 10-20 years from now does not change the fact that it makes me feel GOD AWFUL right now and makes it difficult to enjoy an activity that I usually love. I don't understand how someone can miss being treated with disrespect.
  
  
• Advice: I should change what I wear, that as long as I wear "revealing" clothes when I run, I'm inviting this behavior.
  Why it's bullshit: To me, this is just a variation on the "men can't help it" argument above, and one of the most insidious arguments out there, because it perpetuates the idea that men simply can't control their own sexuality and it is the role of women to control it for them by altering OUR behavior. I run in what I know will keep me comfortable, and I can't imagine anyone would view what I wear as unreasonable (eg, I'm not running around topless or in a thong bikini or anything). To anyone who insists on clinging to this position, I invite you to read a piece from Scarleteen.com entitled, "Your Body Is Never The Problem" (which, by the way, I think should be required reading for all kids upon entering puberty).
  

At the very least, I have accepted that there's nothing that I personally will ever be able to do to change the behavior of these men. So it really seems to come down to a) getting over it, b) accepting that I can't be comfortable on an outdoor run on a warm day, or c) limiting my warm day runs to circling the track (which seems to be a harasser-free zone, thankfully).

So....yeah. A super-cheery post, I know. I really find it difficult to believe that I am the only one who has this problem, even in SF, yet I so rarely hear anyone else talk about it. Am I? Or am I just the last one to accept & get over it?

Sigh.