The challenges of the inconvenient pee

I have very predictable pee schedules. I can get through much of the day without having to go to the toilet very often. Then I go to bed and I have to get up at least twice during the night to pee. Then morning comes and I eat my bowl of oatmeal and have a single cup of tea. That leads to peeing in copious quantities every half an hour for the next three hours or thereabouts.

This makes my life generally difficult. It makes travelling and training pure hell.

Who doesn’t leave their hotel first thing in the morning after breakfast to start their sightseeing? Everyone does that. I do that. But it means that I’m stopping the people with me every half hour to find a toilet until I’m past the critical period of multiple pees. It also means that when I was cycling across Europe, in need of very early starts to get my cycling done as early as possible during the day, I was stopping at the side of the road all the time to pee. I don’t even want to think about the number of people who might have seen my exposed rear end. I try to hide myself away but, seriously, how hidden can you ever be on the side of a major road, for example? It also means getting up at least twice in the middle of freezing cold nights to pee while camping.

Yesterday I had to get my run done early in the morning because I had other things that needed to get done the rest of the day. Do you know how irritating it is to feel an exaggerated sense of needing to pee with every single stomp of your feet on the ground? It’s AWFUL. But I persevered. I had been in this situation many times before. I knew I could get myself through the full run without spontaneously bursting. So I kept running but the ONLY thing on my mind the whole time was how much I really really had to pee. Well, I did briefly think about the restriction I felt around my rib cage caused by a mysterious tightening of my sports bra. But that didn’t last very long. I just really needed to pee.

I also had an early morning body conditioning class yesterday. So I organized my run so that I would end up at the gym. I rushed into the gym, down to the toilets, and emptied my bladder. Pure relief. Shortly afterwards the gym class started. Half way through I had to go to the toilet again and had no choice but to rush out mid-class to relieve myself and then return again. All this because my early morning workouts were all before 10AM yesterday.

So today, here I am, sitting on my couch at home writing a pee-related blog post, waiting for 10AM to come so I can go out on my long bike ride. I DO NOT want to have to stop to pee during my bike ride. I’m sick of it! It always reminds me of the time I had absolutely no choice but to pee inside a little bus shelter standing by the side of the road in Poland. There was nowhere else for me to pee without everyone being able to see every detail. I felt so guilty. As I was peeing I was crying and saying, “I’m so sorry, Poland! I’m so sorry!” But I had to go and there was nowhere else to do it. That counts as one of my worst memories. My aim is to never have to repeat it. That memory is even worse than the memory I have of finding a field to pee in, rushing into the field to hide amongst the tall plants, and releasing before I managed to pull my cycling pants down. That wasn’t so bad because I had an extra pair of pants to switch into and the pee that didn’t get into my pants went into the soil to fertilize the plants. That’s all right. But a bus stop where people wait for a bus??

Anyway, I have to go pee again. It should be safe to leave in about an hour.